Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Institutional - Exchange)

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 Senior Software Engineer on the Coinbase Exchange team within the Institutional group, you'll design, build, and operate the high-performance trading systems that power Coinbase's spot exchange. This team owns the customer-facing FIX, REST, and WebSocket APIs used by institutional and professional trading customers. You'll solve complex problems at the intersection of distributed systems, real-time financial infrastructure, and customer-facing products, directly shaping the reliability and performance of one of the world's largest crypto exchanges.

What you’ll do:

• Design, build, and maintain high-throughput, low-latency APIs and backend services that power order entry, market data, trade execution, and other real-time trading workflows on Coinbase Exchange.
• Own services end-to-end throughout their lifecycle, including technical design, implementation, deployment, observability, scaling, and production support, including participation in on-call rotations.
• Improve the performance, reliability, and operational readiness of distributed systems where availability, correctness, and latency are critical.
• Partner with Product, SRE, Security, and other engineering teams to translate customer and business needs into effective technical solutions.
• Drive engineering quality through design reviews, code reviews, well-tested code, and mentorship that fosters a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement.

Required skills and experience:

• 5+ years building and operating production backend or distributed systems in Java, Go, or a comparable backend language.
• Proven experience designing and scaling high-volume, performance-sensitive services with expertise in concurrency, event-driven architecture, reliability, and performance optimization.
• Experience with real-time or financial systems, market connectivity protocols such as FIX, or high-throughput messaging technologies such as Aer