The Software Engineer will optimize the performance and reliability of blockchain nodes powering Coinbase's assets across numerous protocols. Responsibilities include diagnosing root causes of resource consumption, building observability systems, and improving infrastructure efficiency. The role requires at least two years of software engineering experience with systems-level performance analysis and distributed systems operation.
We're hiring a Software Engineer to join the CB Node team within the Platform organization. This team runs all the blockchain nodes that power every asset Coinbase offers to customers, currently spanning 55 unique protocols across Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, and beyond. You'll contribute to performance optimization and reliability across the blockchain platform stack, diagnosing root causes instead of over-provisioning, reducing infrastructure spend, and building the observability and health-check systems that keep our nodes reliable at scale.
What you'll do:
- Own performance analysis and optimization tasks across the blockchain node stack, diagnosing root causes of resource consumption and implementing system-level fixes that reduce infrastructure spend while maintaining reliability SLOs.
- Build observability, health-check, and automated failover capabilities for blockchain nodes, ensuring the team can detect degradation and respond proactively rather than reactively scaling resources.
- Execute right-sizing improvements across the node fleet, profiling workloads, identifying over-provisioned instances, and contributing to capacity models that balance cost efficiency with reliability.
- Partner with protocol integration engineers, wallet teams, and indexer teams to extend performance improvements across the blockchain platform stack.
- Support the definition and implementation of SLOs and SLIs for node services, helping create measurement frameworks that give the team confidence in reliability without relying on over-provisioning.
- Support protocol upgrades and node operations with a performance-first lens, validating new blockchain versions for resource efficiency and regression-testing before production rollout.
Required Skills and Experience:
- 2+ years of experience in software engineering with exposure to systems-level performance analysis, profiling, or optimization of production infrastructure.
- Experience operating distributed systems, including diagnosing resource bottlenecks, tuning service performance, or managing capacity.
- Proficiency in backend programming (Go preferred) and familiarity with systems tooling for profiling, tracing, and observability (e.g., pprof, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana).
- Demonstrated ability to improve infrastructure efficiency through engineering optimization rather than simply scaling resources.
- Exposure to blockchain nodes, consensus protocols, or crypto infrastructure is a plus; curiosity about how different protocols behave under load and during upgrades.
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.
Job #: P77414
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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