Senior Staff Software Engineer, Institutional Exchange

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on Coinbase's Institutional Exchange team, you'll set the architectural direction for the matching engine, order management, market data, and unified trading systems that clear billions of dollars in daily volume. You'll operate as the most senior technical voice across multiple teams, making critical decisions on latency, correctness, and resilience. This is a rare chance to shape a trading platform from the ground up with startup-level ownership and Coinbase's scale.

What you'll do

• Own the technical strategy and architecture for a core Exchange domain, driving multi-quarter initiatives from ambiguity through incremental milestones to delivery
• Lead the design of ultra-low-latency, event-sourced trading systems spanning matching, risk, and market data across cloud and colocated environments
• Drive cross-team technical alignment across Exchange, Prime, and Derivatives, securing commitment from senior engineering and product leadership
• Set and inspect the quality bar across teams through deterministic testing, failover design, incident leadership, and operational standards for 24/7 markets
• Maintain significant hands-on contribution while leading execution through other senior engineers and tech leads
• Mentor L5-L6 engineers and build the next rung of technical leadership on a lean, high-leverage team

What you bring

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant ownership of production trading, exchange, or market-data systems at scale
• Deep expertise in low-latency distributed systems and a backend language such as Java, C++, or Go, with fluency in JVM and Linux performance tuning
• Demonstrated architectural ownership of an end-to-end trading platform covering order management, multi-venue connectivity, and real-time risk, not a single component
• Proven track record influencing technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority
• Experience operating latency-sensitive systems in on-premises, colocated, and cloud environments, including incident command and safe production change management
• Genuine interest in crypto and institutional markets with the ability to ramp quickly; deep crypto experience is a plus, not a requirement
• Ability to use generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality

What we offer

• Annual base salary of $262,650-$309,000 USD, varying by location
• Total compensation may include equity and bonus eligibility
• Benefits including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k)
• Remote-first work with quarterly in-person working sessions called "surges"

About Coinbase

Coinbase is building the future of institutional trading through the Institutional Everything Exchange, powering systems that let the world's largest financial institutions trade across markets with speed, depth, and trust.