Staff Software Engineer (Institutional, FCM)

Ready to do the most impactful work of your career? At Coinbase, we are uncompromising on our mission to increase economic freedom. The bar is high, the environment is intense, and we like it that way. This isn't a place for complacency, it’s a place to be pushed past your perceived limits. If you're ready to build the future of finance alongside people who refuse to settle for "good enough," you belong here. Coinbase is a remote-first, but not remote-only company. Expect to get together quarterly for intense in-person working sessions called “surges.” learn more about working at Coinbase.

Coinbase is building the future of regulated derivatives as part of the Institutional Everything Exchange, and Coinbase Financial Markets (CFM) is our CFTC-regulated Futures Commission Merchant - the entity that lets retail and institutional clients trade and clear US futures and options. As a Staff Software Engineer on the FCM team, you'll be a hands-on technical anchor across the entire FCM lifecycle: market data, order entry and routing, settlement and money movement, back office reporting, and our in-house risk and liquidation system. You'll help lead a major replatforming onto next-gen architecture and reduce legacy vendor dependencies, a rare chance to re-architect a regulated trading platform from the inside, with the ownership of a startup and the reach of Coinbase.

What you’ll do: 

• Own design and architecture across the FCM core, from market data and order routing through settlement, reporting, and risk.
• Drive the next-gen replatforming and reduce legacy vendor dependencies while raising stability and reliability.
• Set the technical bar through code, design reviews, and standards, and pay down the technical debt that matters most.
• Partner across pods (execution, risk, lifecycle) and cross-functionally with Product, CFM Risk and Ops, Finance, and Compliance to deliver correct, auditable systems and turn strategy into a roadmap.
• Mentor engineers across the team and act as a force multiplier, elevating code quality and architectural rigor.

Required skills and experience:

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience, with demonstrated ownership of complex, production-grade distributed systems.
• Direct FCM or derivatives experience, with hands-on ownership of one or more parts of the futures trade lifecycle (settlement, clearing, margin/risk, order entry/routing, market data, or back office/books and records). Ion XTP or comparable exchange platform experience preferred.
• Deep proficiency in a modern backend language (Go preferred; Java or similar) and event-driven, high-availability architectures.
• Experience in a regulated or financial environment (CFTC/NFA or comparable) where correctness, auditability, and reliability are critical.
• Track record delivering end-to-end - scoping, architecture, implementation, monitoring, and iteration - including replatforming or migrating off legacy systems, while still coding hands-on and raising the quality bar.
• Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.

Position ID:  P77889

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Pay Transparency Notice: Base salary varies by location (see range below). Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)). 

• Application Limit: Candidates may submit a maximum of 3 applications within a 6-month period.
• Equal Opportunity Employer: Coinbase is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or genetic information. Applicants with criminal histories will be considered consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws.
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