# Sophia Wu > Member of Technical Staff @ Cogent | Ex-Coinbase Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/sophiawu Self-taught engineer with a focus on scalable backend services and distributed systems. Passionate about personal growth and building complex, scalable products with a customer mindset in areas of exciting and cutting-edge technology. Chemistry background from Carnegie Mellon University. ## Work Experience ### Founding Engineer @ Cogent Security Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Engineering Manager, P2P Payments & Stablecoin Payments @ Coinbase Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 Led a team of 12+ engineers on P2P Payments / Send Receive, responsible for millions of crypto transfers within the platform and on/off the platform, major projects include: - Successful launch of multi-year decomposition of send/receive monolithic architecture, reducing latency 90%+ and increasing developer velocity - 10-20x scaling of send/receive across 10+ microservices in distributed system architecture Led a new Stablecoin Payments team, evangelizing stablecoin payments for businesses ### Staff Software Engineer, P2P Payments @ Coinbase Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 Tech lead on P2P Payments responsible for strategic roadmap, tactical planning for team members, cross-functional feature launches, operational health across distributed systems, security champion for org - Architected and landed cross-functional Asset Recovery product, helping users recover over $XXX million in lost tokens. Pending patent for innovative transactional design across distributed systems. - Launched the first Multichain send/receive experience in Coinbase, compatible with Consumer, Pro, and onramp to bring Layer-2 networks and Bitcoin Lightning network to our platform, unblocking utility use cases and faster, cheaper global payment options ### Senior Software Engineer, Consumer @ Coinbase Jan 2020 – Jan 2023 - Tech lead of a high-priority tiger team of 10+ engineers to achieve regulatory compliance across the Consumer ecosystem - Designed policies/compliance component as a pre-cursor to a multi-year decomposition effort - One of the early members of the new P2P team, designed to scale the peer-to-peer ecosystem, onboarding 10+ members - Designed and drove first offchain P2P experience for free, instant payments as a peer-to-peer experience - Increased send conversion and sends per sender via net-new integration of contact management experience and send/receive redesigns - Coinbase Wallet backend architecture ### Software Engineer, Growth @ Coinbase Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 Scaled notifications and price alerts platform products, used across the Consumer application New user experience platform to launch new campaigns seamlessly Consumer backend platform scaling ### Senior Software Engineer @ Tophatter Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area - Drove the buyer-side product team forward as a technical product lead by overseeing all parts of the funnel: product functional design and engineering feasibility, API design alignment with backend/clients, feature building cycle, QA testing, analytics/data, quality assurance, and experiment design - Designed and built a generic notifications system to display real-time in-app notifications across 3 clients (web, iOS, android) using Pubnub, currently supporting over hundreds of thousands of messages daily - Led the engineering design and implementation of our first loyalty program for our buyers, leading to stat significant improvements in key business metrics - Led a platform hackathon and the movement of our web app to React and our native apps to React Native - Key technical interviewer for new software engineer candidates of all levels ### Software Engineer @ Tophatter Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area - Designed and built an end-to-end system for collecting sales tax for all purchases on our platform - Implemented a new Braintree integration for all credit card and Paypal transactions to achieve PCI compliance - Increased the efficiency of sending millions of daily marketing emails each day to our user base by 35% - Implemented an overhaul to Payoneer API integration for all payouts to the majority of our sellers in order to comply with new Payoneer SAFE compliance regulations - Improved the security of our app: CSRF protection, session expiration, admin account protection, credit abuse reduction - Debugged live production issues involving database health, latency, data pipeline, sidekiq, security, code-related bugs, etc. ### Formulation Chemist II @ PPG Industries Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Greater Pittsburgh Area -Performed formulation and process research in order to develop new coatings or improve on existing coatings for transition lenses -Identified structure-property relationships of different coating components -Maintained databases to record results -Worked within a multi-disciplinary project team to understand all aspects of transition lens production ### Chemist @ PPG Industries Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Pittsburgh, PA -Analyzed OLED and photochromic dye samples via HPLC and GPC in order to identify content and purity -Created daily reports for research chemists regarding purity content and analysis of their samples ### Research Assistant @ Carnegie Mellon University Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 -Performed extensive research and completed a Master's thesis on the augmentation of the properties of biologically derived materials in order to enhance their medicinal properties -Enhanced the antimicrobial properties of the antibiotic, bacitracin, against bacterial biofilms through synthesis of a modified version and analysis by live/dead assay, mass spectrometry, NMR spectroscopy, IR spectroscopy, UV-Vis spectroscopy -Performed peptide-polymer conjugation and determined its binding affinity to tumor necrosis factor alpha, a cytokine responsible for our body's inflammatory response that can cause chronic inflammation due to its overexpression. Utilized the Fortebio data analysis program for analysis. -Supervised an undergraduate researcher ### Tutor @ Tutornet Ltd Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | Pittsburgh, PA -Traveled to Barack Obama Academy to tutor students -Assisted students in mathematics problems ### Research Assistant @ ChemHost Inc. Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 | Hatfield, PA -Assisted in organic synthesis of epoxides -Performed analysis methods such as TLC and GC-MS to analyze synthesized epoxides -Participated in team meetings to discuss business aspects of the company ### Volunteer @ Abington Health Lansdale Hospital Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 | Lansdale, PA -Assisted nurses when needed -Conversed with patients on a daily basis -Helped fill out paperwork for hospital records -Helped record patient satisfaction with the hospital ### Waitress @ Miraku Japanese Restuarant Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 | Springhouse, PA ### Assistant @ Peachtree and Ward Catering Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 | Radnor, PA -Designed and managed the website and photo gallery -Performed inventory on all catering products -Helped design the new office location and organize event space -Prepared inventory and event details for catering events -Catered at several brunch events ## Education ### Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University ### Software Engineering Self-taught ### Master's Degree in Chemistry Carnegie Mellon University ### Bachelor's Degree in Chemistry Carnegie Mellon University ### High School Germantown Academy ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/sophia-wu-b4605890 --- Source: https://flows.cv/sophiawu JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/sophiawu/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-05