Senior Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

Ready to do the most impactful work of your career? At Coinbase, we are uncompromising on our mission to increase economic freedom. The bar is high, the environment is intense, and we like it that way. This isn't a place for complacency—it's a place to be pushed past your perceived limits. If you're ready to build the future of finance alongside people who refuse to settle for "good enough," you belong here. Coinbase is a remote-first, but not remote-only company. Expect to get together quarterly for intense in-person working sessions called “surges.”

About the role

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Data Platform team within the Platform group, you'll define and lead the technical strategy for Coinbase's data infrastructure, spanning ingestion, transformation, warehousing, streaming, and serving systems. This is a foundational role at the intersection of distributed systems, data engineering, and AI-readiness, reporting to the Senior Director of Engineering. You'll set architectural direction, drive multi-quarter roadmaps, and transition the organization from managed-service dependency toward engineering-built, platform-grade infrastructure that powers everything from fraud detection to modern multi-agent AI architectures.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy and architecture for Data Platform, setting direction across data ingestion, transformation, warehousing, streaming, and serving systems while driving engineering-led cost reduction at the infrastructure layer.
• Architect data infrastructure to natively support AI and ML workloads, ensuring pipelines, data lake systems, and compute can power ML training, feature stores, real-time inference, and multi-agent AI architectures at scale.
• Drive the evolution to near-real-time data availability, enabling downstream teams across the company to act on fresher data for fraud detection, financial reporting, and analytics.
• Build alignment and secure commitment from senior leadership and cross-functional partners across product, infrastructure, 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, while mentoring and elevating senior engineering talent.

Requirements

• 12+ years building and operating large-scale distributed data infrastructure, including streaming platforms, data lakes, batch and real-time processing engines, and query/serving layers.
• Proven track record owning end-to-end technical strategy and architecture for an entire data domain across multiple teams, with demonstrated success transitioning organizations from managed-service dependency toward platform-grade, engineering-built infrastructure.
• Deep systems thinking across the full data lifecycle, with the ability to reason about performance, reliability, cost, security, and privacy at each layer.
• Demonstrated experience designing data systems that support ML training pipelines, feature stores, real-time inference, or AI agent workloads at scale, with familiarity across technologies such as CDC, Kafka, Databricks, Snowflake, or similar.
• Platform mindset with a product-manager orientation toward data infrastructure, focused on reducing friction for developer customers and creating compounding leverage.
• Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.

Pay

Base salary varies by location. Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)). Annual base salary range (excluding equity and bonus): $253,895 USD - $298,700 USD.