What It’s Like to Work on Coinbase’s Consumer Engineering Team Building the “Everything Exchange”

What Does Coinbase’s Consumer Engineering Team Do?

Coinbase’s mission to “increase economic freedom” has remained the same since the company’s founding — but its potential to make a global impact is only growing. 

To move beyond simple trading, the cryptocurrency company is building the “Everything Exchange,” a unified platform where users can engage with every aspect of the onchain economy, from spot trading and derivatives to spending and saving. 

Coinbase’s consumer engineering team is responsible for building this financial platform of the future, empowered by a culture Senior Engineering Manager Jacqueline Teran described as “highly impact-driven.” 

“People want to build and launch new products that move the needle for the business,” she said. “Because we are collectively building products that underpin a new financial system, there is a strong sense that you are a part of something bigger than yourself.”

 

“There is a strong sense that you are a part of something bigger than yourself.”

 

As Coinbase engineers build products that challenge the traditional financial system, the opportunities for learning are “endless,” Software Engineer David Quintero said.

And the best part? They get to lean on the expertise of some of the industry’s brightest technologists, all of whom are driven by one overarching goal: to transform the financial landscape. 

“More importantly, everyone works as a team,” Engineering Manager Nathaniel Mallet said. “This doesn’t mean we need to agree on everything — quite the contrary — but instead, that we work together to come up with the best solutions to problems, and put aside our personal ambitions for the good of the product and the company.”

 

How Coinbase Engineers Improve App Reliability, Infrastructure and Product Quality

Since joining Coinbase in 2020 as a product engineer, Teran has encountered her fair share of growth opportunities, all of which have helped her grow as both a technologist and a leader. 

As a product engineer, she helped build the company’s original Borrow product on iOS before transitioning into a React Native engineering role. After that, Teran founded the company’s app infrastructure team and became an engineering manager. 

“It’s been a bit of a wild ride with some ups and downs, but I’ve never stopped learning along the way,” she said. 

Teran has tackled a variety of impactful projects over the years, but there’s one in particular she’s especially proud of: an app infrastructure project to define and improve Retail App mobile and web quality. This project was designed to reduce error rates, latency and bugs on the company’s platform, and it involved collaborating with different product teams to solve problems from both a technological and organizational perspective. Along the way, she cultivated a more cohesive engineering team. 

“I feel that engineering quality is now understood to be an integral part of product quality,” Teran said. “While the two have always been connected, there is more of a shared understanding across product, engineering and design of what engineering quality looks like and why it’s important.”

In her current role, she oversees both growth and app foundations teams, the latter of which are responsible for the app’s foundational tech layer and own the overall engineering quality of the Coinbase app. Teran said that she enjoys working across all of the product teams. The growth teams enable her to own the experience that gets users to take their initial steps into Coinbase, while the app foundations teams allow her to spearhead the development of impactful web and mobile experiences. 

“I really enjoy being able to strategically weave the products and services together,” she said.

 

 

How Coinbase Engineers Build High-Stakes Crypto Features Across Web and Mobile

When Quintero joined Coinbase as an early-career engineer in 2022, he was drawn to the opportunity to decentralize and democratize not just money, but trust and decision-making.

“Upon joining, it quickly became evident that I was among incredibly talented and mission-focused peers from whose experience and mentorship I would greatly benefit,” Quintero said. “Their generosity and investment in my development have been instrumental in my professional growth, ultimately leading to my promotion.”

One of the most impactful projects he’s worked on involved developing a feature that changed how users understand and manage their margin health for derivatives. 

“This feature was unlike others in the sense that we would not be able to do a gradual rollout or have a meaningful way to rollback once we launched, so the stakes were very high to get it right the first time,” he said. 

According to Quintero, the project required his team to launch margin ratio simultaneously on both the company’s web and mobile platforms to support users in every app version. The feature couldn’t coexist with the pre-existing method, and the requirements were such that a set of users could not rely on one margin health measurement versus another.

After thorough planning and multiple tests, Quintero’s team made it so that all users could switch to the new feature at once, leading to a flawless launch — and an unforgettable growth moment. 

“It was an incredibly rewarding project that I had the privilege to lead from the front end,” he said.

 

How Engineers Grow and Move Between Teams at Coinbase

A lot has changed since Mallet joined Coinbase four years ago, yet one thing remains the same: his passion for the mission. 

Shortly after Mallet stepped into his role, the crypto industry went through a significant bear market. While there was a high degree of uncertainty, his team leaned on the company’s long-term vision to build new features that would better serve consumers and improve their services' infrastructure so they're capable of handling surges in user traffic and volume. 

Mallet’s role has changed as he’s helped the company navigate industry challenges. After starting on the company’s Coinbase One team, where he helped add member benefits to the company’s subscriptions, he moved to the trading team, where he was responsible for user engagement features, such as the Watchlist, Search and Explore page. 

He currently oversees two teams: the trading asset platform team, which provides asset information such as pricing, historical prices and market data, and the Token Sales team, which owns the company’s Token Sales product that lets users participate in initial coin offerings. 

“These tools provide the transparency and access necessary for a global crypto economy,” he said. “It is deeply rewarding to empower engineers to build this foundational infrastructure and directly advance Coinbase’s mission of economic freedom.”

Related ReadingHow Coinbase and Addition Wealth Translate Mission into Measurable Results

 

Coinbase Engineering Culture: Craftsmanship, Teamwork and High-Impact Ownership

According to Mallet, Coinbase’s consumer engineering team values two things above all else: craftsmanship and teamwork. 

“What this means is that everyone on the team cares deeply about building great products, developing strong coding skills, and staying at the forefront of the latest best practices in software engineering,” he said.

For Teran, it feels as though there’s never a dull moment on her team, which not only makes the work fulfilling, but also creates an atmosphere in which evolution is constant.

“I am never bored and am continually challenged, learning, and having fun,” she said. “I love seeing how the crypto economy continues to grow and unfold from the inside.”

 

“I love seeing how the crypto economy continues to grow and unfold from the inside.”

 

 

What’s Next for Coinbase Engineers: AI, Fintech Innovation and Mass Crypto Adoption

As Coinbase pursues its vision for the “Everything Exchange,” Mallet said he’s looking forward to building a world-class financial application — and a world-class engineering team.

“For our part, we want to continue integrating the latest tools and techniques like AI to make our feature development and operations better: more reliable, more performant, more secure, easier to ship high-quality and exciting features and, most importantly, absolutely trustworthy software,” he said.

Coinbase engineering leaders want their consumer engineering team to be known as the place for software developers to build the fintech career of their dreams. That’s why they’re committed to continuing to offer a  great learning culture, strong and ambitious peers, and a supportive environment where failures are seen as learning opportunities.

“If we can do these things, then we can deliver impactful products and attract top engineers to help us build this new financial system,” Mallet said.

Teran echoed Mallet’s excitement.

“There’s a flywheel that’s being unlocked with Coinbase’s new products — the Coinbase One Card, USDC lending and new benefits for Coinbase One subscribers — and we are at a turning point for mass adoption of crypto-backed financial services,” she said. “It’s exciting to be at the forefront of that.”

While Coinbase’s impact on finance and technology is undoubtedly exciting for employees, there’s something else that energizes Quintero just as much: the people who make it all possible.

“Culturally, I want to fan the flames of radical optimism about the future, becoming convinced that the biggest problems are solvable and that we, as builders, can contribute in creating a more open, equitable and efficient system that fundamentally changes the world for the better,” he said.

 

 

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