Staff Software Engineer

About Coinbase

Ready to be pushed beyond what you think you’re capable of? At Coinbase, our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world. It’s a massive, ambitious opportunity that demands the best of us, every day, as we build the emerging onchain platform — and with it, the future global financial system.

To achieve our mission, we’re seeking a very specific candidate. We want someone who is passionate about our mission and who believes in the power of crypto and blockchain technology to update the financial system. We want someone who is eager to leave their mark on the world, who relishes the pressure and privilege of working with high caliber colleagues, and who actively seeks feedback to keep leveling up. We want someone who will run towards, not away from, solving the company’s hardest problems.

Our work culture is intense and isn’t for everyone. But if you want to build the future alongside others who excel in their disciplines and expect the same from you, there’s no better place to be.

While many roles at Coinbase are remote-first, we are not remote-only. In-person participation is required throughout the year. Team and company-wide offsites are held multiple times annually to foster collaboration, connection, and alignment. Attendance is expected and fully supported.

About the Role

The gap between "each service works" and "the system is correct" compounds with every product Coinbase ships, every market it enters, every settlement mechanism it builds. Overseer is the platform that closes it — making cross-service financial correctness a designed property of the infrastructure, not a coordination problem between teams. At staff-level, you’ll define what that platform becomes.

What you’ll be doing (ie. job duties):

• Define and drive the architecture of the correctness layer across Coinbase’s fund flows — from real-time invariant enforcement to AI-powered guardrails.
• Own the core platform: the invariant definition framework, real-time detection engine, and the APIs and tooling that partner teams use to onboard and monitor their fund flows.
• Lead the AI guardrails workstream: predictive consistency models that catch deviations before settlement, and proactive invariant discovery so coverage keeps pace with AI-accelerated development. The same AI that speeds up shipping should speed up the correctness layer around it.
• Set technical direction for the team, make high-stakes architecture decisions, and raise the engineering bar.
• Partner cross-functionally with Transfer Service, Ledger, Payments, Risk, and Compliance to define correctness requirements and drive adoption.
• Mentor engineers and translate platform vision into executable roadmap.

What we look for in you (ie. job requirements):

• 8+ years of software engineering experience.
• You’ve built fault-tolerant, high-reliability distributed systems at scale.
• Platform-builder mindset — you build infrastructure other teams depend on, not features for a single product.
• Experience leading cross-functional technical work with significant company-wide impact.
• Strong judgment on where to invest: you can distinguish the load-bearing correctness problem from the interesting-but-optional one.
• 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 haves:

• Experience with financial systems, reconciliation, or ledgering at scale.
• Streaming data infrastructure (Kafka, Flink, or similar).
• You’ve worked with Golang, Ruby, Docker, Postgres, MongoDB or DynamoDB.
• AI applied to predictive consistency or proactive gap discovery in financial or distributed systems.
• Crypto-forward experience, including familiarity with onchain activity such as interacting with Ethereum addresses, using ENS, and engaging with dApps or blockchain-based services.
• You have gone through a rapid growth in your company (from 10 to 100s of engineers)

Key skills/competency

• Staff Software Engineer
• Distributed Systems
• Platform Engineering
• System Architecture
• AI/ML
• Financial Systems
• Blockchain Technology
• Scalability
• Fault Tolerance
• Cross-functional Leadership