Staff Software Engineer, Solana Staking Protocol

ABOUT THE ROLE As a Staff Software Engineer on the Staking Platform team within the Platform group at Coinbase, you will serve as the company's definitive Solana staking technical authority. This role requires a deep understanding of the Solana protocol, validator operations, staking integrations, and protocol evolution. You will be responsible for owning Coinbase's multi-year technical strategy for Solana staking, leading the engineering effort to achieve industry-leading APY, and serving as the company's foremost authority on the Solana runtime and consensus mechanism. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a key member of the Staking Platform team, your responsibilities will include: - Owning Coinbase's multi-year technical strategy for Solana staking across validator performance, protocol participation, and product integration. - Leading the engineering effort to achieve industry-leading APY through validator optimization, including vote accuracy, block production, MEV strategies, commission tuning, and stake distribution tooling. - Serving as Coinbase's foremost authority on the Solana runtime, consensus mechanism, staking economics, and validator client landscape (Agave, Firedancer). - Partnering with Retail and Institutional Staking product and engineering teams to architect scalable staking integrations across Coinbase's product surface. - Representing Coinbase in the Solana ecosystem by maintaining relationships with the Solana Foundation, core development teams, and major validators. - Building production infrastructure for validator operations, monitoring, automation, and reliability while mentoring IC4-IC5 engineers on Solana-specific domain expertise. WHAT YOU'LL NEED To be successful in this role, you will need: - 10+ years of software engineering experience with extensive hands-on Solana protocol experience, including deep familiarity with the runtime, validator mechanics, staking economics, consensus (Tower BFT), and the validator client ecosystem at the source-code level. - Production-level proficiency in Rust and/or Go, with deep experience building and operating complex distributed infrastructure at scale (bare metal, cloud, networking, observability). - Established presence in the Solana ecosystem with existing relationships across the Solana Foundation, core contributor teams, or major validators. - Demonstrated ability to define multi-quarter technical strategies, break ambiguous large-scope problems into executable plans, and drive cross-functional alignment with product, business, and executive stakeholders. - Familiarity with Solana's evolving staking landscape (liquid staking, stake pools, restaking protocols) or comparative PoS protocol experience (Ethereum, Cosmos). WHY REMOTE Coinbase is a remote-first company, but not remote-only. You will be expected to participate in quarterly in-person working sessions called "surges" to collaborate with your team and drive innovation. BENEFITS Coinbase offers a competitive total compensation package, including an annual base salary range of $218,025 to $256,500 USD, as well as equity and bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)).