Hybrid Senior Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

at Coinbase

• Job title: Senior Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: $253,895 - $298,700 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Location requirements: Hybrid, United States

About the role

• Senior Staff Software Engineer leading technical strategy for Coinbase's Data Platform. Focused on building scalable data infrastructure supporting AI and ML workloads.

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.

Benefits

• Health insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• 401(k)
• Paid time off
• Professional development opportunities