Principal Software Engineer, AI Automation

Coinbase is a company on a mission to increase economic freedom in the world by becoming an 'AI-first' organization. They are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead AI Automation efforts, architecting Agentic AI systems and driving the transition to an AI-driven company, while collaborating with leadership to identify automation opportunities.

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.)