Sr. Staff Technical Architect, Unified Trading
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.
Team/ Role:
Coinbase is building the future of institutional trading as part of the Everything Exchange, powering the systems that let the world's largest financial institutions trade across markets with speed, depth, and trust. As a Risk Architect on the Trading team, you'll design, build, and own the real-time risk engine at the heart of a unified trading platform: cross-asset user and portfolio risk evaluated in real time on the core trading system that serves our Retail, Prime, and wholesale brokerage customers. It's a rare chance to architect risk infrastructure from the ground up, with the ownership of a startup and the reach of Coinbase.
What you’ll do:
- Own the architecture of the real-time, cross-asset risk and margin engine: user and portfolio modeling, multifactor and borrow risk, and cross-portfolio evaluation at scale.
- Design low-latency, high-throughput risk systems, keeping correctness and performance in step with a growing trading platform.
- Drive reliability and performance, owning SLOs, observability, and incident response for risk-critical systems.
- Set the technical bar through code, design reviews, and standards, and pay down the technical debt that matters most.
- Serve as the risk-architecture anchor for the team, mentoring engineers and reducing single-point-of-failure risk.
- Partner cross-functionally with Product, Trading, Financing/Credit Risk, Security, and Compliance to turn technical vision into a roadmap.
Required skills and experience:
- Hands-on architect, able to design, build, deploy, and support 24/7 risk systems that process billions of dollars of transactions daily.
- Extensive backend engineering experience, with demonstrated ownership of complex, production-grade distributed systems.
- Track record of architecting a cross-asset risk system (crypto, equities, FCM, or derivatives) with user/portfolio modeling and real-time, cross-portfolio evaluation at scale.
- Deep proficiency in low-latency Java and high-throughput messaging (Aeron, SBE, or similar), designing event-driven, high-availability systems.
- Experience with multifactor and borrow risk, margin, or clearing in a regulated or financial environment where correctness, auditability, and low-latency performance are critical.
- Experience delivering projects end-to-end: scoping, architecture, implementation, monitoring, and iteration.
- Experience making decisions that balance engineering trade-offs with end-user quality, demonstrated through shipped products.
- Responsible use of generative AI, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.
Position ID: P77879
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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Best personality fits for this role
Your natural leadership and drive to execute perfectly fit owning the architecture and setting technical standards.
Read the ENTJ career guide →You excel at strategic, big-picture thinking—perfect for architecting a real-time risk engine from the ground up.
Read the INTJ career guide →Your meticulous attention to detail ensures correctness and auditability in risk-critical financial systems.
Read the ISTJ career guide →