Lead Architect: Ultra-Low-Latency Trading Platform

Coinbase; Los Angeles (CA); Hybrid; USD 260,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Exchange team to set architectural direction for matching engines, order management, market data, and unified trading systems that handle billions in daily volume. You will be the senior technical voice across teams, owning latency, correctness, and resilience.

Expect to lead multi-quarter initiatives from ambiguity to delivery while maintaining hands-on contribution and mentoring junior leaders on a lean team.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering with production trading/exchange systems.
• Expert in low-latency distributed systems and JVM/Linux tuning.
• End-to-end trading platform ownership across venues and risk.
• Ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy and architecture for a core Exchange domain.
• Lead design of ultra-low-latency, event-sourced trading systems across matching, risk, and market data.
• Drive cross-team technical alignment across Exchange, Prime, and Derivatives.
• Set and inspect the quality bar across teams for testing, failover, and 24/7 markets.
• Maintain hands-on contribution while guiding senior engineers and leads.
• Mentor L5-L6 engineers and build next-level technical leadership.

Skills

Low-latency systems

Java/C++/Go

Architectural ownership

Cross-team influence

Incident command

Job description

Coinbase is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Exchange team to set architectural direction for matching engines, order management, market data, and unified trading systems that handle billions in daily volume. You will be the senior technical voice across teams, owning latency, correctness, and resilience.

Expect to lead multi-quarter initiatives from ambiguity to delivery while maintaining hands-on contribution and mentoring junior leaders on a lean team.