Senior Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

Unchain Data; United States; Remote; USD 254,000 - 299,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase seeks a visionary Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead the Data Platform's technical strategy. You will shape architecture for ingestion, storage, and AI-ready data pipelines, guiding multi-quarter roadmaps and cross-functional collaboration.

You will mentor engineers, push for near-real-time data availability, and drive cost-aware, scalable infrastructure decisions across product, privacy, security, and analytics teams.

Qualifications

• Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed data infrastructure.
• Strong systems thinking across data lifecycle including security and privacy.
• Proven experience moving teams to engineering-built, platform-grade infra.
• Platform mindset: empathetic to developer customers and reducing friction.
• Experience designing data systems for ML training pipelines and AI workloads.
• Proven track record owning technical strategy for an entire domain across teams.

Responsibilities

• Define and Drive Technical Strategy for Data Platform across ingestion, transformation, warehousing, streaming and serving systems.
• Develop and execute a multi-quarter roadmap to shift from cost-saving to engineering-led cost reduction.
• Architect for AI-Native future, enabling data infra for AI/ML workloads and multi-agent AI architectures.
• Drive near-real-time data availability for downstream teams and stakeholders.
• Foster a builder mindset to create data infrastructure with compounding leverage.
• Secure cross-functional alignment with senior leadership on priorities and tradeoffs.
• Be the primary technical voice for Data Platform in org-wide forums and planning.

Skills

Distributed data infra

Systems thinking

Platform engineering

Data for ML pipelines

Technical strategy

Job description

About Us

At Coinbase, our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world. It's a massive, ambitious opportunity that demands the best of us, every day, as we build the emerging onchain platform — and with it, the future global financial system.

To achieve our mission, we're seeking a very specific candidate. We want someone who is passionate about our mission and who believes in the power of crypto and blockchain technology to update the financial system. We want someone who is eager to leave their mark on the world, who relishes the pressure and privilege of working with high caliber colleagues, and who actively seeks feedback to keep leveling up. We want someone who will run towards, not away from, solving the company's hardest problems.

Our work culture is intense and isn't for everyone. But if you want to build the future alongside others who excel in their disciplines and expect the same from you, there's no better place to be.

While many roles at Coinbase are remote-first, we are not remote-only. In-person participation is required throughout the year. Team and company-wide offsites are held multiple times annually to foster collaboration, connection, and alignment. Attendance is expected and fully supported.

The Role

Achieving our mission requires not just great products, but a world-class data foundation beneath them. The Data Platform team is the engine that makes Coinbase's data reliable, fast, and accessible at scale — powering everything from fraud detection and financial reporting to the AI and ML systems that will define Coinbase's next decade.

We are looking for a visionary, hands-on Senior Staff Software Engineer to help define and lead the technical strategy for Coinbase's Data Platform. This is a foundational role at the intersection of distributed systems, data engineering, and AI-readiness — and a rare opportunity to build something that matters at the infrastructure level of one of the most important companies in crypto.

You will report into the Senior Director of Engineering, Data Platform, and serve as the domain's top technical leader. You will set architectural direction, mentor and elevate engineering talent, drive multi-quarter roadmaps, and be a key voice in shaping how Coinbase evolves from a collection of managed data services into a true, scalable data platform. This role operates with significant autonomy and is expected to have impact across multiple cross-functional teams and the broader Infrastructure organization.

Responsibilities

• Define and Drive Technical Strategy: Own the technical strategy and architecture for Data Platform, setting direction across data ingestion, transformation, warehousing, streaming, and serving systems.
• Develop and execute a multi-quarter roadmap that transitions the team from operational cost-saving toward engineering-led cost reduction — rethinking how cost scales with infrastructure, not just how to trim it.
• Architect for the AI-Native Future: Redesign data infrastructure from the ground up to natively support AI and ML workloads — ensuring that data pipelines, data lake infrastructure, and compute systems can power fraud and other AI models, and modern multi-agent AI architectures.
• Drive the evolution to near-real-time data availability: Enable downstream teams to act on fresher data across the company.
• Spearhead Builder Mindset: Push the team to build data infrastructure that creates compounding leverage.
• Drive Cross-Functional Alignment: Build alignment and secure commitment from senior leadership and cross-functional partners — product, infrastructure, data engineering, 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.

Requirements

• Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed data infrastructure — streaming platforms, data lakes, batch and real-time processing engines, and query/serving layers.
• Strong systems thinking: you understand the full data lifecycle and can reason about performance, reliability, cost, security and privacy at each layer.
• Proven experience moving teams from managed-service dependency toward engineering-built, platform-grade infrastructure.
• A platform mindset: You think like a product manager for data infrastructure — deeply empathetic to your developer customers, focused on reducing friction, and obsessed with leverage.
• Experience designing data systems that support ML training pipelines, feature stores, real-time inference, or AI agent workloads at scale.
• Proven track record owning the technical strategy and architecture for an entire domain across multiple teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience at high-scale tech-forward fintech, crypto, or financial services companies.
• Familiarity with compliance, data governance, or regulatory data requirements.
• Experience with change data capture (CDC), Kafka Connect, or real-time ETL pipelines.
• Experience working on Databricks and/or Snowflake.
• Experience operating large scale data platforms on public cloud infrastructure.
• Background contributing to open-source data infrastructure projects.

Compensation

Depending on your work location, the target annual base salary for this position can range from $253,895 to $298,700 USD. Total compensation may also include bonus eligibility and benefits (including medical, dental, vision and 401(k)).