[Remote] Senior Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Coinbase is a leading company in the cryptocurrency space focused on increasing economic freedom. They are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer for their Data Platform team to define and lead the technical strategy, ensuring the data infrastructure supports AI and ML workloads while enhancing data availability across the organization.

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

Skills

• 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
• Demonstrates the ability to responsibly use generative AI tools and copilots (e.g., LibreChat, Gemini, Glean) in daily workflows, continuously learn as tools evolve, and apply human-in-the-loop practices to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in efficiency, cost, and quality
• Experience at high-scale tech-forward fintech, crypto, or financial services companies
• Familiarity with compliance, data governance, or regulatory data requirements
• Experience with change data capture (CDC), Kafka Connect, or real-time ETL pipelines
• Experience working on Databricks and/or Snowflake
• Experience operating large scale data platforms on public cloud infrastructure
• Background contributing to open-source data infrastructure projects

Benefits

• Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k))

Company Overview