Staff Software Engineer, Backend (consumer - Trading)

Staff Software Engineer - Backend (Trading)

Ready to be pushed beyond what you think you're capable of? At Coinbase, our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world. It's a massive, ambitious opportunity that demands the best of us, every day, as we build the emerging onchain platform — and with it, the future global financial system. To achieve our mission, we're seeking a very specific candidate. We want someone who is passionate about our mission and who believes in the power of crypto and blockchain technology to update the financial system. We want someone who is eager to leave their mark on the world, who relishes the pressure and privilege of working with high caliber colleagues, and who actively seeks feedback to keep leveling up. We want someone who will run towards, not away from, solving the company's hardest problems. Our work culture is intense and isn't for everyone. But if you want to build the future alongside others who excel in their disciplines and expect the same from you, there's no better place to be. While many roles at Coinbase are remote-first, we are not remote-only. In-person participation is required throughout the year. Team and company-wide offsites are held multiple times annually to foster collaboration, connection, and alignment. Attendance is expected and fully supported.

The Staff Software Engineer - Backend (Trading) on the Consumer Portfolio team will play a critical dual role: as a deeply technical individual contributor and a strategic technical leader. You will anchor new projects, define the technical direction for the Portfolio experience, and mentor a growing team, all while helping realize Coinbase's "Everything Exchange" strategy. The Consumer Portfolio team owns the core portfolio experience for all retail users, providing the low-latency platform for balance, position, and performance tracking. This is one of the most engaged-with areas of the Coinbase app, supporting millions of users and billions of transactions across multiple product types. This role is for an engineer who thrives on tackling complex, high-impact distributed systems that require high reliability and performance—especially in a trading and financial technology context.

What You'll Be Doing

• Serve as the technical leader and strategist for the Consumer Portfolio team, defining multi-quarter technical strategies that intersect multiple financial products.
• Architect, develop, and own distributed systems that power low-latency portfolio tracking for all Consumer users.
• Provide technical structure and partner closely with management and stakeholders to translate business goals into a defined strategic roadmap.
• Design and implement foundational, high-performance infrastructure components, leveraging tools like Kafka and Clickhouse in an event-sourced architecture.
• Manage individual project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables with strong technical expertise.
• Mentor and coach other team members on advanced design techniques, coding standards, and best practices for building robust value-add products.
• Leverage our modern, diverse tech stack to write high-quality, production-ready code that is thoroughly tested and delivers a critical product to market.

What We Look For In You

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with significant experience architecting and developing solutions to ambiguous, high-impact problems.
• Demonstrated experience with low-latency, event-driven, or distributed systems.
• A strong signal if you have a background in building consumer facing trading products or any application that handles large amounts of streaming data.
• Passion for building an open financial system that brings the world together.
• Intellectual curiosity, openness, and a passion for building a culture of positive energy and blameless truth-seeking.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with trading systems or portfolio management products.
• Familiarity with the tech stack, including Golang, Clickhouse, Kafka, Redis, MongoDB.
• Experience building financial, high reliability, or security systems.
• Background in Blockchains (such as Bitcoin, Ethereum) or crypto-forward experience (e.g., interacting with Ethereum addresses, ENS, dApps).
• Experience with a company going through rapid growth (from 10 to 100s of engineers).

Pay Range: $218,025—$256,500 USD

Commitment to Equal Opportunity Coinbase is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation or any other basis protected by applicable law. Coinbase will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.