Senior Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

ABOUT THE ROLE As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Data Platform team at Coinbase, you will define and lead the technical strategy for Coinbase's data infrastructure, spanning ingestion, transformation, warehousing, streaming, and serving systems. This is a foundational role at the intersection of distributed systems, data engineering, and AI-readiness, reporting to the Senior Director of Engineering. You will set architectural direction, drive multi-quarter roadmaps, and transition the organization from managed-service dependency toward engineering-built, platform-grade infrastructure that powers everything from fraud detection to modern multi-agent AI architectures. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a key member of the Data Platform team, you will be responsible for: - Owning the technical strategy and architecture for Data Platform, setting direction across data ingestion, transformation, warehousing, streaming, and serving systems while driving engineering-led cost reduction at the infrastructure layer. - Architecting data infrastructure to natively support AI and ML workloads, ensuring pipelines, data lake systems, and compute can power ML training, feature stores, real-time inference, and multi-agent AI architectures at scale. - Driving the evolution to near-real-time data availability, enabling downstream teams across Coinbase to act on fresher data for fraud detection, financial reporting, and analytics. - Building alignment and securing commitment from senior leadership and cross-functional partners across product, infrastructure, analytics, ML, privacy, security, and compliance on technical priorities and tradeoffs. - Serving as the primary technical voice for Data Platform in org-wide forums including OKR planning, architecture reviews, and long-term infrastructure strategy, while elevating senior engineering talent. WHAT YOU'LL NEED To succeed in this role, you will need: - 12+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed data infrastructure, including streaming platforms, data lakes, batch and real-time processing engines, and query/serving layers. - A record of owning end-to-end technical strategy and architecture for an entire data domain across multiple teams, with demonstrated success transitioning organizations from managed-service dependency toward platform-grade, engineering-built infrastructure. - Deep systems thinking across the full data lifecycle, with the ability to reason about performance, reliability, cost, security, and privacy at each layer. - Demonstrated experience designing data systems that support ML training pipelines, feature stores, real-time inference, or AI agent workloads at scale, with familiarity across technologies such as CDC, Kafka, Databricks, Snowflake. - A platform mindset and product-manager orientation toward data infrastructure, focused on reducing friction for developer customers and creating compounding leverage. - The ability to utilize generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality. WHY REMOTE Coinbase is a remote-first company, but not remote-only. You can expect to get together quarterly for intense in-person working sessions called “surges.” BENEFITS The base salary for this role varies by location, with an annual range of $253,895 - $298,700 USD. Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility, as well as benefits such as medical, dental, vision, and 401(k).