Forward Deployed Engineer, Compliance [Office of the CTO]

About the role

Coinbase's Compliance organization manages regulatory obligations across products, operations, and growth — spanning transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, regulatory change management, and exam readiness across 60+ global entities. This role sits directly inside the Office of the CTO, embedded as a founding engineer within Compliance.

Responsibilities

• Embed with Compliance leadership and frontline teams to surface the automation opportunities with the greatest business leverage — developing ground-level understanding of workflows like transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, regulatory change management, and exam preparation.
• Prototype quickly and pragmatically using Coinbase's existing AI platform as the default foundation before recommending net-new builds.
• Owning the Compliance automation roadmap in partnership with the Chief Compliance Officer and Compliance leadership, translating complex regulatory workflows — case resolution, trade surveillance, risk assessment, policy management — into engineering requirements and engineering constraints back to stakeholders clearly.
• Define the build-vs-buy strategy for Compliance tooling, evaluating what Coinbase should build internally, adopt from partner teams, procure from vendors, or retire.
• Ensure every automated compliance output is traceable, reviewable, and defensible to regulators — with auditability, approval gates, evidence retention, and human-in-the-loop controls as first-class design concerns, not afterthoughts.
• Drive adoption through brown-bags, prototype walkthroughs, and feedback loops that bring Compliance teams along on the journey and ensure tools actually get used.

Requirements

5+ years of software engineering experience with a demonstrated ability to ship production systems in ambiguous, stakeholder-heavy environments, with greenfield experience a strong plus.

Hands-on experience deploying LLM-based applications, including prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, hallucination guardrails, and human-in-the-loop design for high-stakes compliance outputs.

Proven ability to embed with non-technical domain experts, rapidly internalize complex workflows, and translate them into engineering requirements.

Familiarity with compliance and regulatory systems concepts: transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, regulatory filing workflows, case management, and audit-ready data handling.

Familiarity with multi-agent orchestration concepts including how agent systems handle handoffs, escalation, and auditability.

Experience in a Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Engineering, or embedded technical advisory capacity, ideally in compliance-tech, RegTech, or financial services environments.

Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.

Qualifications

Required skills and experience as outlined above.