Senior Platform Engineer - CNCF & AWS

At Coinbase, we are uncompromising on our mission to increase economic freedom. Coinbase is a remote-first company built for high intensity and rapid execution, where teams gather quarterly for focused, in-person working sessions called "Surges."

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Compute Platform team, you'll own the primary compute orchestration infrastructure that every service at Coinbase runs on. Built largely on Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) technologies—including Kubernetes and Istio—this platform underpins the scalability, reliability, and efficiency of Coinbase's entire product suite. You will design and ship tooling, automation, and net-new platform capabilities that enable hundreds of engineers to deploy and operate critical services safely, while partnering closely with Security, Reliability, and Observability teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Cluster Orchestration & Management: Own the design, build, and operation of Kubernetes cluster management tooling and automation that maintains platform reliability and self-healing at scale.
• Developer Tooling & AI Workflows: Build developer-facing tooling and workflows that streamline how engineers interact with Kubernetes, with a focus on integrating AI-driven automation and developer support.
• Net-New Compute Capabilities: Deliver infrastructure features for service owners, such as one-off jobs, cron scheduling, deployment strategies, Amazon EFS support, and automated resource right-sizing.
• Operational Excellence & Toil Reduction: Automate operational toil, reduce on-call burden, and continuously enhance platform observability, monitoring, and incident response capabilities.
• Cross-Functional Security & Reliability: Partner closely with Security, Reliability, and Observability engineering teams to ensure the compute platform complies with Coinbase's security, performance, and uptime standards.

Requirements

Experience & Education

• 5+ years of general software engineering experience.
• 3+ years dedicated experience building and operating Kubernetes or similar compute orchestration systems at scale (e.g., Mesos, Nomad, Amazon ECS).

Technical Skills & Infrastructure

• Strong proficiency in one or more backend programming languages (e.g., Go, Python, Java) with experience shipping production-grade infrastructure services.
• Hands-on production experience with AWS and/or GCP infrastructure services (e.g., EC2, EKS, IAM, VPC, and networking) at scale.
• Hands-on expertise with the CNCF ecosystem (e.g., Helm, Prometheus, ArgoCD, Envoy, Istio).
• Proven ability to design, implement, and operate distributed systems, diagnose complex runtime failures, and drive issues to root-cause resolution.

AI Tooling & Operational Mindset

• Demonstrated ability to apply AI tooling and generative AI responsibly within infrastructure workflows to improve developer productivity, automation, cost efficiency, and quality.

Benefits & Workplace Perks

• Compensation: Competitive base salary, equity options, and performance bonus eligibility.
• Health Coverage: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance plans.
• Retirement Savings: 401(k) retirement savings plan with company options.
• Flexibility & Surges: Remote-first flexibility paired with quarterly in-person team collaboration "surges."