software-engineering

Hiring for the Coinbase Infrastructure team

A brief guide to how we scale our infrastructure talent

What makes great infrastructure?

The right cloud?
The right storage technology?
A great CDN?
The newest OS or kernel?
A shiny data center filled with blinkenlights?

At Coinbase, we don’t do infrastructure; we are Infrastructure.

We solve hard problems that sit in the little-known space between web-scale infrastructure and trading infrastructure. Those domains have historically relied on very different approaches to achieve reliability and scalability for customers. At Coinbase, we have to supersize both.

We’re working on multi-region, multi-cloud, reliability & scaling, decomposition of monoliths and a ton of other exciting challenges. For example, traditional infrastructure leans heavily on centralization and trust — however as Coinbase is growing the decentralized crypto ecosystem we have opportunities to rethink infrastructure in terms of decentralization and trustless architectures.

At the same time we understand that it takes teams, trust and collaboration to build a successful product. Coinbase’s success requires the best foundational infrastructure, therefore we deeply value our contributors who are building those foundations.

We work hard to make sure that our infrastructure team feels happy, engaged, successful and growing.

Why should I care?

Despite being a public company, the interesting challenges we are called on to solve are not completed; we’re just getting started!

As an engineer on the team, you will be responsible for defining, architecting and building the foundational services on which all products at Coinbase run. You’ll be part of a highly skilled team with an extremely collaborative and supportive culture. You will be learning from some of the top minds in the field and will be pushing yourself and the boundaries of infrastructure to its limits.

At Coinbase, we work hard to keep the rocketship in flight and we’re upgrading the engine to warp speed. All this while promoting collaboration and learning among our teammates. So if you’re feeling unchallenged at your current role, we can probably fix that — come talk to us.

How do you structure your teams?

We proactively split teams as they grow beyond 8–10 ICs. As of this post, we organize ourselves into the following teams:

Backend Platform: On the backend platform team you will deal with issues at Internet scale, maintaining datastores, APIs and our critical backend caching infrastructure supporting web and native applications. The team enables product teams to build highly available and scalable services that power much of Coinbase’s core service offerings.

Developer Productivity: The Developer Productivity team helps software engineers at Coinbase build and ship high-quality software. We create, secure, and scale first-class tooling and infrastructure that impacts nearly a thousand developers and all of Coinbase’s software systems. You will ensure our developers have a world-class development environment complete with test harnesses & frameworks, static analysis, and continuous integration. If you have a passion for helping other engineers iterate faster, and a monorepo environment with Bazel, Golang, and Ruby excites you, we want to hear from you.

Cloud: Are you an engineer that loves the low level details? Do you want to work on networking and cloud automation? Become a key part of our team by adding multi-region, multi-cloud to every part of Coinbase. As a Cloud engineer, you will create the building blocks that codify best practices for all engineers at Coinbase, upholding the highest standards of security, architecture, and reliability. Working with experts across the company, you are the key to maintaining infrastructure quality at Coinbase.

Reliability: Do you like bringing order to chaos in order to scale systems to 10x load? Can you see yourself being responsible for keeping a 24/7, multi-billion dollar market place running smoothly and reliably? SRE at Coinbase are responsible for helping engineers architect critical, high performance, high availability systems and making them run with minimal amounts of toil.

InfraSec: Do you want to be a part of the team that creates the foundations to protect the world’s cutting edge crypto-exchange? We’re looking for engineers that are excited about creating highly fortified, performant and easy to use infrastructure.

What do the current ICs on our infra team think?

Thomas: Senior Software Engineer

Working on the Infra team at Coinbase is like building the machine that builds the machine. With Coinbase’s global scale and quickly growing team, any change you make will have a big impact. No matter if you’re enabling other developers to better develop, build, deploy, or run their code, your work directly increases the productivity multiplier across the whole company.

Aarti: Senior Software Engineer

Infra is a foundational team at Coinbase composed of high performing individuals with diverse/complementary skill-sets and experiences who all come together as a team to solve hard scaling and reliability problems while being vigilant about security. At the core of the culture is a shared sense of purpose to improve Infrastructure and developer experience for the growing Coinbase Engineering teams.

Max: Software Engineer

The Infra team at Coinbase is building a secure and reliable foundation for a fast growing company. Working here enables you to gain a breadth of experiences ranging from designing scalable and secure network architecture that underlies thousands of production services running across multiple geographic regions to building essential tools that enable hundreds of engineers to bring their ideas to production with the least amount of friction.

Frances: Software Engineer

Infra builds the foundation of our entire system. We are in charge of building reliable and secure systems and tools, making them easy to use, and enabling engineers to keep their promises in production. Working here means that you get the best of both worlds — interacting with people across the company as well as getting immediate feedback on tooling from other engineers.

Come and join us as we scale the cryptoeconomy. Apply here for our Senior Backend Engineer role.

Hiring for the Coinbase infrastructure team was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.