Senior Staff Software Engineer, Legal Automation

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's Legal organization is at an inflection point. We manage corporate governance for 60+ global subsidiaries, public company reporting, equity programs, a venture portfolio, M&A, every institutional client agreement, and product counsel for all of Coinbase's PGs — from tokenized equities to stablecoin launches. Our clients are the CEO, COO, and every product group at the company. We work at the speed of a crypto startup with the compliance requirements of a public financial institution.

We are not looking to incrementally improve. We are looking to reimagine how legal work gets done at scale — replacing manual, high-volume workflows with AI-native systems, building an agent platform where today's junior lawyers become tomorrow's agent builders, and proving a model for how every non-technical org at Coinbase can transform with AI.

We have a roadmap, we have playbooks, and we have deep domain knowledge. What we need now is a technical architect to build the platform that brings this vision to life.

What You'll Do:

• Embed with Legal leadership — Spend meaningful time alongside the VP of Legal, the CCO, and their teams. Shadow workflows, join planning sessions, and develop a ground-level understanding of what's actually slowing the organization down. You can't engineer what you don't understand.

• Identify and prototype the highest-leverage automation opportunities — Map the workflows, find the 20% that drives 80% of the pain, and ship working prototypes that prove the concept before scaling.

• Set the Legal automation roadmap — Work with the VP of Legal and CCO to define a multi-quarter automation roadmap prioritized by business impact. Translate complex legal workflows into engineering requirements. Translate engineering constraints back to legal stakeholders. Fluency in both directions is non-negotiable.

• Define the build-vs-buy strategy — Evaluate what Coinbase should build internally, what it should integrate, and what it should retire. You write the proposal, own the decision, and manage the outcome.

• Deliver production-grade AI systems — Prototypes that don't scale aren't the goal. You're responsible for ensuring that what gets built is auditable, reliable, and maintainable — with the right guardrails, observability, and human-in-the-loop design baked in from day one.

• Be the technical thought partner to Legal leadership — Serve as the technical conscience of the Legal org. Challenge assumptions, surface engineering risk early, and make sure both sides of the table — legal and engineering — stay aligned.

Required Skills and Experience:

• 12+ years of backend software engineering, with a track record of shipping production systems at scale

• Proven experience deploying LLM-based applications to production — including evaluation frameworks, grounding, hallucination guardrails, and human-in-the-loop design

• Multi-agent orchestration experience — you've designed and operated systems where multiple AI agents collaborate, hand off work, and escalate to humans appropriately

• Exceptional ability to communicate with and rapidly learn from non-technical domain experts — you don't need to know legal terminology on day one, but you need to internalize complex workflows quickly and translate them into engineering requirements

• Strong judgment on what to build vs. integrate — you think in reusability and long-term maintainability, not just point solutions

• Distributed systems fundamentals — document processing, routing logic, structured evaluation, audit trails; you understand how to architect this correctly from day one

• Proven ability to deliver in ambiguous, greenfield environments with senior stakeholder visibility

• Demonstrated use of generative AI tools and copilots (e.g., LibreChat, Gemini, Glean) in daily workflows, with strong human-in-the-loop judgment

Nice to Have:

• Experience in an embedded or deployment-focused engineering model (e.g., forward-deployed, professional services, or solutions engineering at an AI-first company)

• Prior exposure to legal tech, compliance automation, or regulated industry workflows

• Experience driving alignment across multiple engineering teams to ship a single outcome

Job ID: P77646

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)).

Annual base salary range (excluding equity and bonus): $253,895—$298,700 USD

• 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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