Staff Enterprise Architect

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.

The Enterprise Architecture team turns business objectives into technology decisions across Coinbase's business systems including custom-developed, third-party applications, and agentic automations, partnering with business functions and engineering teams to buy, build, and scale software applications with a focus on design patterns, technical debt, and security. This Staff Enterprise Architect will own key Enterprise Engineering (EE) initiatives such as Technical Debt, Application Portfolio Management, Integration Keys Mechanism, and contribute to the Architecture Forum.

What you’ll do:

• Provide leadership and expertise in the development, maintenance, and governance of enterprise architecture guidelines and design patterns to ensure the reliability and scalability of the application ecosystem.
• Develop and maintain technical roadmaps to guide the evolution of the application ecosystem from current to future states, aligning with strategic and business capability roadmaps.
• Drive application portfolio health programs focused on identifying, mitigating, and eliminating technical debt and security hardening where appropriate.
• Evaluate new applications and platforms to ensure alignment with the organization’s technology and governance strategies, policies, and standards from business, application, data, solution, and technology perspectives.
• Develop and maintain system diagrams that illustrate the relationship between business value, capabilities, and technology.
• Contribute to an Architecture Forum of architects and engineers, facilitating collaboration, debate, and education on acceptable design patterns and solutions.
• Lead the analysis and evaluation of leading and emerging technologies and market trends, assessing their impact and opportunities for the enterprise architecture, with a focus on digital capabilities and innovations to support business strategy.
• Work closely with solution architects to provide frameworks, guidelines, and best practices for implementing and configuring applications and database technologies.
• Contribute to large-scale, enterprise-wide transformation initiatives, overseeing technical aspects from current state assessments through delivery and execution.

Required Skills and Experience:

• Experience in Enterprise Architecture: At least five (5) years of hands-on experience in Enterprise Architecture, with a proven track record of collaboration with domain, data, and security engineers, as well as solution architects.
• Expertise in Architecture Standards: Demonstrated ability to develop, document, and publish Enterprise Architecture guidelines and design patterns that align with organizational objectives.
• Cybersecurity: Proficient in security best practices including authentication, authorization, encryption, integration key management, and logging.
• Technical Debt Management: Significant experience in leading efforts to identify, monitor, and strategically reduce technical debt across the enterprise.
• OKRs Delivery with Architectural Impact: Strong background in setting and achieving Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) that have broad and lasting impacts on architectural decisions and outcomes.
• Team Collaboration and Leadership: History of working within high-performing teams, offering constructive feedback, and fostering an environment of continuous improvement.
• Escalation Management and Decision-Making: Skilled in handling complex escalations, effectively communicating trade-offs, and driving decisions to timely and successful resolutions.
• Effective Stakeholder Communication: Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex architectural concepts to a diverse range of stakeholders, including senior technical and business leaders, subject matter experts, peers, and technical delivery teams.

Nice to haves:

• Passion for Emerging Technologies: Strong enthusiasm for the crypto, blockchain, and NFT industries, with an understanding of their impact on the economy.
• Enterprise Platform Experience: Familiarity with enterprise platforms such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Anaplan, Workday, Contentful, or comparable systems, with the ability to leverage these tools effectively.
• Performance Optimization for High-Load Systems: Experience in designing or enhancing the performance of high-load customer service platforms, ensuring scalability and reliability.
• Quantitative Risk Modeling in Architecture: Experience in developing quantitative architecture risk models, including the measurement of technical debt and trade-offs using risk factors.
• Understanding of SDLC Methodologies: Knowledge of various Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) methodologies, including both Agile and non-Agile approaches.
• Systems-Level Programming Proficiency: Proficiency in at least one systems-level programming language, with Go being highly preferred.
• Frontend and Backend Development Skills: Familiarity with modern development frameworks and languages, including Go, React, JavaScript, TypeScript, and their related ecosystems.
• Data Management Expertise: Experience with SQL and modern data stores, such as Snowflake, for managing and querying large datasets.
• Salesforce Architecture Knowledge: Deep understanding of Salesforce (SFDC) architecture, including multi-org strategies and customization best practices.
• Proficiency with Development and Collaboration Tools: Strong proficiency in using Git, Confluence, Jira, LeanIX, or equivalent tools for version control, documentation, project management, and enterprise architecture.