Principal Software Engineer, AI Automation

Coinbase is on a mission to increase economic freedom in the world, and they are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead their AI Automation efforts. This role involves architecting sophisticated AI systems, solving complex AI problems, and mentoring engineering teams to elevate AI literacy within the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Architect Agentic Systems: Design and build sophisticated multi-agent architectures that move beyond simple chat to autonomous execution and complex reasoning
• Solve the "Hard Problems" of AI: Define and implement reliable evaluation frameworks, eliminate hallucinations through rigorous data grounding, and build deep observability into LLM reasoning chains
• Build the Core AI Platform: Develop the underlying primitives and orchestration tools that will allow the rest of the org to adopt AI, improving developer productivity and operational efficiency across the entire organization
• Lead the AI-First Transition: Partner with leadership to identify high-impact automation opportunities across Product Foundations and Core functions, ensuring our AI strategy creates compounding leverage
• Bridge Engineering and AI: Act as a "Software Engineer with deep AI expertise"—applying world-class backend engineering principles (scalability, reliability, performance) to the bleeding edge of Generative AI
• Mentor and Elevate: Serve as a mentor to senior ICs and engineering teams, raising the bar for AI literacy and engineering excellence across the organization

Requirements:

• Deep AI/LLM Expertise: Extensive experience working with LLMs, RAG, and Agentic frameworks. You understand the nuances of prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and the current limitations of frontier models
• Backend Engineering Mastery: You are a seasoned Software Engineer at heart. You can build the robust, scalable systems required to put AI into production at a global scale
• Proven Strategic Leadership: Experience operating with organizational level impact, leading technical strategy across multiple domains
• Visionary Mindset: You are 18 months ahead of the industry curve. You can see how AI will transform business processes and have the technical chops to build that future today
• Focus on Reliability: A passion for solving the 'unsolved' problems of AI: evaluation, grounding, and deterministic outcomes in non-deterministic systems
• Multi-Agentic Architecture: Specific experience building or researching systems where multiple AI agents collaborate to solve complex tasks
• Fintech or Compliance Background: Experience navigating the complexities of highly regulated environments
• Open Source Contributions: Active contributions to the AI/ML community or major LLM frameworks (LangChain, AutoGPT, etc.)