Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Institutional - Foundations)

Details

At Coinbase we are building the emerging onchain platform and the future global financial system. You will join the Coinbase Institutional team, working on products for institutional customers (Coinbase Prime, Coinbase Advanced Trade, Custody, Commerce, Exchange). The role balances individual contribution with technical leadership: driving architecture, anchoring projects, mentoring engineers, and delivering foundational infrastructure used across engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Architect and develop distributed systems and foundational infrastructure.
• Provide technical structure to teams and collaborate with management and stakeholders to define strategic roadmaps.
• Manage project priorities, deadlines and deliverables using technical expertise.
• Mentor and train team members on design techniques and coding standards.
• Design and implement foundational infrastructure components used by every engineering team in production (examples: dynamic configuration, secrets storage, container orchestration).
• Write high-quality, well-tested code to meet customer needs.
• Participate in team and company offsites and in-person activities as required (role is remote-first but not remote-only; in-person participation is expected throughout the year).

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering.
• Demonstrated experience architecting and developing solutions to ambiguous problems with significant impact.
• Strong systems and architecture skills; experience designing distributed systems and reliable production infrastructure.
• Experience mentoring and training other engineers.
• Passion for building an open financial system and working with crypto/blockchain technologies is required.

Nice to haves

• Experience scaling through rapid company growth (from 10 to 100s of engineers).
• Experience with blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum and familiarity with onchain activity (interacting with Ethereum addresses, ENS, dApps).
• Experience decomposing a large monolith into microservices.
• Experience with Golang, Ruby, Docker, Sinatra, Rails, Postgres.
• Experience building financial, high-reliability, or security-critical systems.

Compensation & Benefits

• Pay Range: $211,650—$249,000 USD (target annual salary; full-time offers also include bonus eligibility, equity eligibility, and benefits).
• Benefits include medical, dental, vision, HSA contributions, 401(k) with match, disability and life insurance, wellness stipend, mobile/internet reimbursement, connections stipend, volunteer time off, fertility counseling and benefits, generous time off/leave policy, and the option to be paid in digital currency.

Additional Information

• Job #: P60280
• #LI-Remote — remote-first but in-person participation is required throughout the year.
• Coinbase is an Equal Opportunity Employer and committed to reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities.
• Coinbase pilots AI tools for initial screening in select roles; these pilots do not make final employment decisions.