Senior Backend Engineer — AI-Driven DevOps & Merge Gate

Coinbase, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 186,000 - 219,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design and build backend services powering a unified merge gate and related developer workflows.

You will collaborate with Security, Compliance, Infrastructure, and product engineering teams to ensure reliable, observable decisions across GitHub, CI/CD, and policy systems. You should have strong backend and distributed systems experience, proficiency in Go, and hands-on AI fluency to evaluate AI-assisted engineering workflows, while driving

Qualifications

• 7+ years experience.
• Strong backend and distributed-systems experience in Go or a comparable language.
• Experience designing APIs, durable state, failure recovery, observability, and safe rollout mechanisms.
• Experience with CI/CD, source-control integrations, developer infrastructure, or another high-consequence control plane.
• Strong security and authorization judgment.
• Evidence of leading a cross-team technical project from design through migration and operational ownership.
• Hands-on AI fluency. The candidate should know how to use and evaluate AI-assisted engineering workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of Coinbase’s Unified Merge Gate, the system that determines whether a change can merge and explains what remains before it can proceed.
• Integrate automated review findings, policy and risk assessments, CI results, identity and attestation evidence, and required human judgment into one merge decision.
• Build reliable backend services and integrations across GitHub, CI and other Coinbase’s policy systems.
• Migrate repositories from fragmented legacy controls to the Unified Merge Gate, with safe rollouts, observable decisions, and clear rollback paths.
• Partner with Security, Compliance, Infrastructure, Codeflow, ZTSC, and repository owners to turn control requirements into usable developer workflows.
• Measure the effect on human-review volume, time-to-merge, automated merge coverage, decision quality, and escaped defects.

Skills

Cross-team leadership

AI fluency

Security judgment

APIs design

Tools

Go

Distributed systems

CI/CD

Policy systems

Kubernetes

Job description

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design and build backend services powering a unified merge gate and related developer workflows.

You will collaborate with Security, Compliance, Infrastructure, and product engineering teams to ensure reliable, observable decisions across GitHub, CI/CD, and policy systems. You should have strong backend and distributed systems experience, proficiency in Go, and hands-on AI fluency to evaluate AI-assisted engineering workflows, while driving