Staff Software Engineer, Solana Staking Protocol

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.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Staking Platform team within the Platform group, you'll serve as Coinbase's definitive Solana staking technical authority, owning strategy across validator operations, staking integrations, and protocol evolution. Coinbase operates one of the largest Solana staking operations in the world, managing approximately 9.25% of all staked SOL. You'll combine deep Solana protocol mastery with hands-on engineering execution and external ecosystem influence to shape Coinbase's Solana staking trajectory.

What you'll do:

• Own Coinbase's multi-year technical strategy for Solana staking across validator performance, protocol participation, and product integration, connecting engineering decisions to yield optimization, cost efficiency, and customer growth.
• Lead the engineering effort to achieve industry-leading APY through validator optimization, including vote accuracy, block production, MEV strategies, commission tuning, and stake distribution tooling.
• Serve as Coinbase's foremost authority on the Solana runtime, consensus mechanism, staking economics, and validator client landscape (Agave, Firedancer), evaluating protocol upgrades (e.g., SIMD proposals) and proactively positioning Coinbase for changes before they land.
• Partner with Retail and Institutional Staking product and engineering teams to architect scalable staking integrations across Coinbase's product surface, while advising on non-staking Solana initiatives requiring deep protocol knowledge.
• Represent Coinbase in the Solana ecosystem by maintaining relationships with the Solana Foundation, core development teams, and major validators, contributing to protocol governance, and speaking at conferences.
• Build production infrastructure for validator operations, monitoring, automation, and reliability while mentoring IC4-IC5 engineers on Solana-speci