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Salary: USD 186,065 - 218,900 / annual
Coinbase is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to own the Data Layer team within the Platform group. You will shape the GraphQL API platform that connects every client application to Coinbase's backend services, handling the majority of user traffic across Consumer, Base, and Institutional products.
In this role, you'll own critical systems that route and serve API requests at scale, improving reliability, performance, and developer experience for hundreds of engineers building on this foundation layer. You will deliver projects end-to-end, from scoping and system design through implementation, rollout, and production validation, driving measurable progress on the team's highest-priority initiatives.
Key responsibilities include designing and building high-reliability, low-latency systems serving millions of users, tackling challenges like caching, upstream service optimization, and efficient connection management at scale. You'll build and improve the API framework and tooling that hundreds of engineers depend on, making it fast and easy for teams across the company to build, test, and ship independently.
You will drive operational excellence across T0 services by owning SLOs, improving observability, leading incident response, and reducing operational toil. You'll partner cross-functionally with product engineering teams to design API schemas, support service launches, and ensure the platform evolves to meet their needs. You'll set the technical bar through code and design reviews, mentor engineers across the team, and contribute to architectural direction.
Required qualifications include 5+ years of professional engineering experience with demonstrated ownership of complex, production-grade distributed systems. You need deep proficiency in backend languages (Go, Java, or similar) with hands-on experience designing microservices, API platforms, and high-availability systems. You should have a track record of delivering projects end-to-end in environments where reliability and performance are non-negotiable, and experience decomposing complex systems into clean APIs adopted by multiple consuming teams. Comfort with on-call responsibilities and incident response across multi-service architectures is essential. You should demonstrate the ability to align technical decisions with cross-functional stakeholders and translate platform capabilities into actionable plans.
