Staff Software Engineer, Solana Staking ProtocolActive$46K–$183K

The opportunity

Ready to do the most impactful work of your career? At Coinbase , we are uncompromising on our mission to increase economic freedom.

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-specific domain expertise.

What they're looking for

  • + years of software engineering with extensive hands-on Solana protocol: experience, including deep familiarity with the runtime, validator mechanics, staking economics, consensus (Tower BFT), and the validator client ecosystem at the source-code level.
  • Production-level proficiency in Rust and/or Go, with deep experience building: and operating complex distributed infrastructure at scale (bare metal, cloud, networking, observability).
  • Established presence in the Solana ecosystem with existing relationships: across the Solana Foundation, core contributor teams, or major validators, and a track record of public speaking or protocol governance participation.
  • Demonstrated ability to define multi-quarter technical strategies, break: ambiguous large-scope problems into executable plans, and drive cross-functional alignment with product, business, and executive stakeholders.