Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Platform (Overseer)

Coinbase is on a mission to increase economic freedom in the world, and they are seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend to help build their emerging onchain platform. The role involves defining the architecture of the correctness layer for fund flows, owning the core platform, and leading AI guardrails workstreams while mentoring engineers and collaborating cross-functionally.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the architecture of the correctness layer across Coinbase’s fund flows — from real-time invariant enforcement to AI-powered guardrails
• Own the core platform: the invariant definition framework, real-time detection engine, and the APIs and tooling that partner teams use to onboard and monitor their fund flows
• Lead the AI guardrails workstream: predictive consistency models that catch deviations before settlement, and proactive invariant discovery so coverage keeps pace with AI-accelerated development. The same AI that speeds up shipping should speed up the correctness layer around it
• Set technical direction for the team, make high-stakes architecture decisions, and raise the engineering bar
• Partner cross-functionally with Transfer Service, Ledger, Payments, Risk, and Compliance to define correctness requirements and drive adoption
• Mentor engineers and translate platform vision into executable roadmap

Requirements:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience
• You've built fault-tolerant, high-reliability distributed systems at scale
• Platform-builder mindset — you build infrastructure other teams depend on, not features for a single product
• Experience leading cross-functional technical work with significant company-wide impact
• Strong judgment on where to invest: you can distinguish the load-bearing correctness problem from the interesting-but-optional one
• 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 with financial systems, reconciliation, or ledgering at scale
• Streaming data infrastructure (Kafka, Flink, or similar)
• You've worked with Golang, Ruby, Docker, Postgres, MongoDB or DynamoDB
• AI applied to predictive consistency or proactive gap discovery in financial or distributed systems
• Crypto-forward experience, including familiarity with onchain activity such as interacting with Ethereum addresses, using ENS, and engaging with dApps or blockchain-based services
• You have gone through a rapid growth in your company (from 10 to 100s of engineers)