Coinbase ejecting senior ex-bank engineers as pro service shuts
The vision is no more, or is at least being heavily pared back. After launching a professional trading platform, Coinbase Pro in 2018, Coinbase announced yesterday that it's merging pro into a "new unified Coinbase account" with the result that Pro will effectively cease to exist.
The move seemingly won't impact Coinbase Exchange, but will simply mean that all users can access Coinbase services in one place. However, it's likely contributed to the exit of many of the senior engineers who joined Coinbase from financial services firms.
Most senior among them is Jonathan Yam, who spend a year building Coinbase's engineering team after joining from IEX the US stock exchange founded in New York City in 2012. Yam's remit included everything from exchange development to product and platform engineering, exchange operations and architecture and strategic initiatives. He previously worked everywhere from Lehman to Barclays to RBC and Citi.
Two months ago, Yam was hiring remote engineers for exchange trading jobs at Coinbase. However, last week, he said he was among Coinbase's 1,000 job cuts.
Engineers are among the employees most impacted by the layoffs. Coinbase's 'talent hub', which lists all the employees let go, has the names of 328 engineers looking for new roles. They include engineers who were in the process of joining before having their offers rescinded, including Yu Kuan Ma from Credit Suisse in New York, Somi Ogbozor from Goldman Sachs, Sanjay Paraboo from AQR, and Michael Kazman from Royal Bank of Canada.
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