Senior Staff Software Engineer, Legal Automation

Coinbase

2d•$253,895 - $298,700•Remote

About The Position

Coinbase is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to join their Legal organization, which is undergoing a significant transformation. The role focuses on reimagining how legal work is done at scale by replacing manual workflows with AI-native systems and building an agent platform. This position is crucial for developing the technology that will bring this vision to life, acting as a technical architect for the Legal AI infrastructure. The company emphasizes a high-performance culture and is a remote-first organization with quarterly in-person working sessions. Coinbase's Legal department manages a wide range of responsibilities, including corporate governance for global subsidiaries, public company reporting, equity programs, a venture portfolio, M&A, client agreements, and product counsel for all product groups. They operate at the speed of a crypto startup while adhering to the compliance requirements of a public financial institution. This role is a pilot for forward-deployed engineering in non-technical organizations, aiming to create a model for AI transformation across other functions like Finance, HR, and Operations.

Requirements

12+ years of backend software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping production systems at scale.
Proven experience getting LLM-based applications to production, including evaluation frameworks, grounding, guardrails against hallucination, and human-in-the-loop design.
Multi-agent orchestration experience, having designed and operated systems where multiple AI agents collaborate, hand off work, and escalate to humans appropriately.
Exceptional ability to communicate with and learn from non-technical domain experts.
Platform mindset, thinking in primitives, reusability, and standards.
Distributed systems fundamentals.
Relentless drive to set and achieve ambitious goals in ambiguous, greenfield environments.
Demonstrates the ability to responsibly use generative AI tools and copilots (e.g., LibreChat, Gemini, Glean) in daily workflows, continuously learn as tools evolve, and apply human-in-the-loop practices to deliver business-ready outputs.

Responsibilities

Architect and build Legal AI infrastructure, designing and shipping a platform of AI agents and automated workflows to replace high-volume, templated legal work.
Own the institutional client agreement automation system, building an end-to-end agentic workflow for ingesting counterparty markups, evaluating them against a playbook, generating redlines, routing for review, and tracking outcomes.
Build a cohesive agent platform and governance layer, consolidating ad-hoc bots and agents into a consistent, documented, and maintainable platform with standards for building and deploying Legal agents.
Act as the technical thought partner to the VP and broader Legal leadership team, translating complex legal workflows into engineered systems and engineering constraints back to non-technical stakeholders.
Define the make-vs-buy strategy, evaluating and retiring third-party legal tech tools in favor of purpose-built internal solutions.
Serve as the case study for forward-deployed engineering in non-technical organizations at Coinbase, creating a playbook for AI transformation in other functions.