Staff Software Engineer – Policies Platform, Identity
Coinbase
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Hybrid
Location: California • New York • United States
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Job Level
Tech Stack
About the role
- Own the technical strategy and architecture for the Policies Platform — including the AI-native policy authoring system, Policy Framework v2, edge authorization, and the self-serve developer experience.
- Define and drive the technical roadmap, making deliberate tradeoffs between speed, reliability, and long-term scalability as the platform expands to support new Coinbase products and international regulatory requirements.
- Lead the most ambiguous, highest-risk initiatives on the team — including AI-powered impact simulation before policy changes ship, AI chatbot for compliance self-service, and embedding authorization into API gateway-level signed tokens.
- Secure cross-team alignment and commitment — working with 20+ dependent domain teams, regulatory/compliance stakeholders, and engineering leadership to drive adoption of new platform standards and patterns.
- Define engineering processes and quality practices — from code review standards for policy-as-code, to CI/CD pipeline requirements for automated load and regression testing.
- Maintain high technical output while simultaneously elevating the capabilities of the broader team — you lead by doing, not just advising.
- Contribute to org-wide initiatives including OKR planning, technical prioritization, and long-term platform strategy in partnership with engineering leadership.
Requirements
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of architecting and delivering systems at scale — high-throughput, high-availability services serving millions of requests in production.
- Proven experience leading AI/LLM product development — building AI agents, code generation systems, or developer-facing AI tooling in production environments.
- Strong command of Go, gRPC, Kubernetes, and service mesh architectures.
- Ability to drive technical clarity in ambiguous, high-stakes situations — you can take a vague problem (
- "compliance teams can't self-serve"), define the right solution space, and execute it to completion.
- A history of influencing across organizational boundaries — getting buy-in from skeptical stakeholders, aligning competing priorities, and building durable cross-team partnerships.
- Excellent written and verbal communication — you produce technical design documents that build organizational confidence and create shared understanding.
- Remote-friendly with on-site presence at either the San Francisco or New York City office approximately once per week for architecture reviews, stakeholder meetings, and team offsites
- 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.
Benefits
- 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.
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
software engineeringsystem architectureAI product developmentGogRPCKubernetesservice mesh architecturepolicy-as-codeCI/CDautomated load testing
Soft Skills
technical clarityinfluencingcross-team collaborationcommunicationproblem-solvingleadershipstrategic planningadaptabilitystakeholder engagementmentoring