Staff AI Platform Engineer — Lead Tier-1 Reliability

Coinbase, Inc.; Helena (MT); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer within the Customer Experience (CX) sub-organization of the Enterprise Applications and Architecture group.

You will anchor eight globally distributed squads, architect scalable backend services, and drive production AI infrastructure improvements with a focus on reliability, security, and governance. You'll lead AI tooling strategy, ensure scalable, compliant internal platforms, and deliver high-quality code from design to delivery while

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience leading ambiguous, high-impact technical initiatives across multi-team problem spaces, writing high-quality, well-tested code.
• Strong experience with cloud-native infrastructure including AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, event-driven architectures (Kafka, MQ), and SQL/NoSQL databases.
• Track record building secure internal tools or platforms with data governance in a regulated environment.
• Experience building or integrating with agentic AI systems including MCP servers, LLM orchestration layers, RAG pipelines, HITL workflows, or evaluation/guardrail frameworks, with proficiency in Go and willingness to work across Python.

Responsibilities

• Own the EAA-CX AI maturity and developer-experience roadmap in partnership with engineering leadership, embedding with squads to surface opportunities, prototyping on Coinbase's existing AI platform, and driving adoption through working demos and feedback loops.
• Lead platform excellence workstreams that improve reliability, observability, change-failure rate, and operational readiness for Tier-1 systems, partnering with engineering managers to ensure practices persist on the teams.
• Define build-versus-buy strategy for developer-experience and AI tooling across EAA-CX, evaluating what to build internally, adopt from partner teams, procure from vendors, or retire.
• Provide Staff-level architectural coverage across squads facing complex challenges, ramping in to land architecture or delivery and ramping off while maintaining portfolio-wide coherence.
• Build highly reliable, secure distributed backend services with full SLO ownership, observability, and incident response, ensuring automated outputs and production changes are traceable, reviewable, and safe in a regulated environment.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend service design

API development (gRPC, MCP, GraphQL)

Go

Python

Cloud-native infra (AWS)

Kubernetes

Terraform

CI/CD pipelines

Event-driven architectures

Security controls

AI systems integration

Leadership

LLM orchestration

Tools

Kafka

GraphQL

gRPC

MCP servers

LLM orchestration layers

Kubernetes

Terraform

AWS

Job description

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer within the Customer Experience (CX) sub-organization of the Enterprise Applications and Architecture group.

You will anchor eight globally distributed squads, architect scalable backend services, and drive production AI infrastructure improvements with a focus on reliability, security, and governance. You'll lead AI tooling strategy, ensure scalable, compliant internal platforms, and deliver high-quality code from design to delivery while