Staff Software Engineer: AI Platform & Tier-1 Systems

Coinbase, Inc.; Olympia (WA); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for its Customer Experience engineering group. You will anchor architectural direction across eight squads, focusing on AI tooling, platform reliability, and scalable backend services.

You’ll drive developer experience, define build-versus-buy strategies, and raise Tier-1 engineering quality while maintaining secure, compliant operations in a regulated environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with distributed systems.
• Backend service design, API development (gRPC, GraphQL) and microservices.
• Cloud-native infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD.
• Security controls, audit logging, and data governance in regulated environments.
• Experience with agentic AI systems or guardrails is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own the EAA-CX AI maturity and developer-experience roadmap with engineering leadership.
• Lead platform-excellence workstreams to improve reliability and observability.
• Define build-versus-buy strategy for AI tooling across EAA-CX.
• Provide Staff-level architectural coverage across squads with coherence.
• Build secure distributed backend services with full SLO ownership and audits.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

API development (gRPC, GraphQL)

Go

Python

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

CI/CD pipelines

Security controls

SQL/NoSQL databases

Kafka / MQ

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kafka

MQ

SQL databases

NoSQL databases

Job description

Coinbase is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for its Customer Experience engineering group. You will anchor architectural direction across eight squads, focusing on AI tooling, platform reliability, and scalable backend services.

You’ll drive developer experience, define build-versus-buy strategies, and raise Tier-1 engineering quality while maintaining secure, compliant operations in a regulated environment.