Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform

Overview

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. 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.

At Coinbase, our mission to increase economic freedom requires a world-class data foundation beneath products. The Data Platform team is the engine that makes Coinbase’s data reliable, fast, and accessible at scale — powering fraud detection, financial reporting, and the AI and ML systems that will define Coinbase’s next decade.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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…