Forward Deployed Engineer, Legal [Office of the CTO]

Leyla; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 186,000 - 219,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase's Legal organization seeks a founding engineer embedded in Legal to automate high-value workflows, including contract review, regulatory filings, and governance. You will surface opportunities, prototype quickly on Coinbase's AI platform, and ensure outputs are secure and auditable.

You'll partner with Legal leadership and engineering to translate complex legal processes into actionable requirements, define build-vs-buy strategies, and drive adoption across teams with practical,

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience shipping production systems in stakeholder-heavy environments.
• Hands-on experience deploying LLM-based applications, including prompt engineering and evaluation frameworks.
• Ability to embed with non-technical domain experts and translate workflows into engineering requirements.
• Familiarity with contract lifecycle, regulatory filing workflows, entity governance, and privilege-sensitive data handling.

Responsibilities

• Embed with Legal leadership to surface automation opportunities with greatest business leverage.
• Prototype quickly using Coinbase's AI platform as the baseline foundation and recommendations for builds.
• Own the Legal automation roadmap in partnership with Legal leaders, translating workflows into engineering requirements.
• Define the build-vs-buy strategy for Legal tooling and decide what to build internally or procure.
• Ensure automated outputs are traceable, auditable, and have human-in-the-loop controls.
• Drive adoption through brown-bags, prototype walkthroughs, and feedback loops with Legal teams.

Skills

Software engineering

LLM deployments

Stakeholder collaboration

Legal tech familiarity

Prompt engineering

Auditing & governance

Job description

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.” learn more about working at Coinbase.

Coinbase's Legal organization manages corporate governance across 60+ global subsidiaries, public company reporting, institutional client agreements, and product counsel for every product group. This role sits directly inside the Office of the CTO, embedded as a founding engineer within Legal. You'll identify high-value workflow opportunities, rapidly prototype solutions using Coinbase's existing AI platform, and drive measurable adoption of AI tooling across the Legal org. You'll be the connective tissue between Legal stakeholders and the engineering teams who maintain Coinbase's AI platform, acting as advocate, translator, and builder in one.

What you'll do:

• Embed with Legal leadership to surface the automation opportunities with the greatest business leverage — developing ground-level understanding of workflows like contract review, regulatory filing drafts, and subsidiary governance.
• Prototype quickly and pragmatically using Coinbase's existing AI platform as the default foundation before recommending net-new builds.
• Own the Legal automation roadmap in partnership with the VP of Legal and CCO, translating complex legal workflows — entity management, litigation tracking, product counsel reviews, compliance reporting — into engineering requirements and engineering constraints back to stakeholders clearly.
• Define the build-vs-buy strategy for Legal tooling, evaluating what Coinbase should build internally, adopt from partner teams, procure from vendors, or retire.
• Ensure every automated legal output is traceable, reviewable, and defensible — with privilege boundaries, auditability, and human-in-the-loop controls as first-class design concerns.
• Drive adoption through brown-bags, prototype walkthroughs, and feedback loops that bring Legal teams along on the journey and ensure tools actually get used.

Required Skills and Experience:

• 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 legal outputs.
• Proven ability to embed with non-technical domain experts, rapidly internalize complex workflows, and translate them into engineering requirements.
• Familiarity with legal and compliance systems concepts: contract lifecycle management, regulatory filing workflows, entity governance, and privilege-sensitive data handling
  • Does not need to be an attorney, but should be open to learning.
• 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 legal-tech, compliance-tech, or RegTech environments.
• Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.

Pay Transparency Notice:

Base salary varies by location (see range below). Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)).

Annual base salary range (excluding equity and bonus):

$186,065 — $218,900 USD

• Application Limit: Candidates may submit a maximum of 3 applications within a 6-month period.
• Equal Opportunity Employer: Coinbase is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or genetic information. Applicants with criminal histories will be considered consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws.
• US Applicants: View Employee Rights, Know Your Rights, and E-Verify Notice of Participation.
• Accommodations: If you are an individual with a disability who needs a reasonable accommodation, email us your request and contact info at accommodations[at]coinbase.com.Need screen reading technology? Click here to download a free compatible screen reader and view the tutorial.
• Data Privacy & Arbitration: By submitting your application, you agree to our Candidate Privacy Notice. US applicants: By submitting your application, you agree Arbitration of Disputes.