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At Coinbase, our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world. Achieving that goal requires not just great products, but a world-class data foundation beneath them. The Data Platform team is the engine that makes Coinbase's data reliable, fast, and accessible at scale — powering everything from fraud detection and financial reporting to the AI and ML systems that will define Coinbase's next decade.
The Role
We are looking for a visionary, hands-on Senior Staff Software Engineer to help define and lead the technical strategy for Coinbase's Data Platform. This is a foundational role at the intersection of distributed systems, data engineering, and AI-readiness — and a rare opportunity to build something that matters at the infrastructure level of one of the most important companies in crypto.
You will report into the Senior Director of Engineering, Data Platform, and serve as the domain's top technical leader. You will set architectural direction, mentor and elevate engineering talent, drive multi-quarter roadmaps, and be a key voice in shaping how Coinbase evolves from a collection of managed data services into a true, scalable data platform. This role operates with significant autonomy and is expected to have impact across multiple cross-functional teams and the broader Infrastructure organization.
What You'll Do
- Define and Drive Technical Strategy: Own the technical strategy and architecture for Data Platform, setting direction across data ingestion, transformation, warehousing, streaming, and serving systems.
- Develop and execute a multi-quarter roadmap that transitions the team from operational cost-saving toward engineering-led cost reduction — rethinking how cost scales with infrastructure, not just how to trim it.
- Architect for the AI-Native Future: Redesign data infrastructure from the ground up to natively support AI and ML workloads — ensuring that data pipelines, data lake infrastructure, and compute systems can power fraud and other AI models, and modern multi-agent AI architectures.
- Drive the evolution to near-real-time data availability: Enable downstream teams to act on fresher data across the company.
- Spearhead Builder Mindset: push the team to build data infrastructure that creates compounding leverage.
- Drive Cross-Functional Alignment: build alignment and secure commitment from senior leadership and cross-functional partners — product, infrastructure, data engineering, analytics, ML, privacy, security and compliance — on technical priorities and tradeoffs.
- Serve as the primary technical voice for Data Platform in org-wide forums including OKR planning, architecture reviews, and long-term infrastructure strategy.
What We Look For
- Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed data infrastructure — streaming platforms, data lakes, batch and real-time processing engines, and query/serving layers.
- Strong systems thinking: you understand the full data lifecycle and can reason about performance, reliability, cost, security and privacy at each layer.
- Proven experience moving teams from managed-service dependency toward engineering-built, platform-grade infrastructure.
- A platform mindset: You think like a product manager for data infrastructure — deeply empathetic to your developer customers, focused on reducing friction, and obsessed with leverage.
- Experience designing data systems that support ML training pipelines, feature stores, real-time inference, or AI agent workloads at scale.
- Proven track record owning the technical strategy and architecture for an entire domain across multiple teams.
- Demonstrates the ability to responsibly use generative AI tools and copilots (e.g., LibreChat, Gemini, Glean) in daily workflows, continuously learn as tools evolve, and apply human-in-the-loop practices to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in efficiency, cost, and quality.
Nice to Have
- Experience at high-scale tech-forward fintech, crypto, or financial services companies
- Familiarity with compliance, data governance, or regulatory data requirements.
- Experience with change data capture (CDC), Kafka Connect, or real-time ETL pipelines.
- Experience working on Databricks and/or Snowflake
- Experience operating large scale data platforms on public cloud infrastructure
- Background contributing to open-source data infrastructure projects.
Job ID# P75554
Please be advised that each candidate may submit a maximum of four applications within any 30-day period. We encourage you to carefully evaluate how your skills and interests align with Coinbase's roles before applying.
Commitment to Equal Opportunity
Coinbase is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation or any other basis protected by applicable law. Coinbase will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. For US applicants, you may view the Employee Rights and the Know Your Rights notices by clicking on their corresponding links. Additionally, Coinbase participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law.
Coinbase is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation because of a disability for any part of the employment process, please contact us at accommodations[at]coinbase.com to let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. For quick access to screen reading technology compatible with this site click here to download a free compatible screen reader (free step by step tutorial can be found here).
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AI Disclosure
For select roles, Coinbase is piloting an AI tool based on machine learning technologies to conduct initial screening interviews to qualified applicants. The tool simulates realistic interview scenarios and engages in dynamic conversation. A human recruiter will review your interview responses, provided in the form of a voice recording and/or transcript, to assess them against the qualifications and characteristics outlined in the job description.
For select roles, Coinbase is also piloting an AI interview intelligence platform to transcribe and summarize interview notes, allowing our interviewers to fully focus on you as the candidate.
The above pilots are for testing purposes and Coinbase will not use AI to make decisions impacting employment. To request a reasonable accommodation due to disability, please contact accommodations[at]coinbase.com