Amy Yin

I'm a software engineer at Coinbase passionate about helping women engineers unleash their power to lead! I was the first engineer hired for Coinbase Commerce, a non-custodial payment processor that allows merchants to accept cryptocurrencies. While studying Computer Science at Harvard, I founded the Harvard Women in Computer Science and received the Harvard College Women's Leadership Award for contributions to the technical and entrepreneurial community of women at Harvard. At Coinbase I helped create Women@Coinbase, the first employee resource group, and advise Team Block Society, a nonprofit building a community of women in blockchain. Before Coinbase I was an engineer at Hired and Facebook's Internet.org and started Vapor Communications while in college with Harvard Professor David Edwards. In my free time you can catch me in an inversion or practicing yoga, at music festivals with friends, reading or traveling. Beyond my love of technology and blockchain, I am very excited about helping people unlock their fullest, greatest potential. Technology is powerful but only as powerful and creative as the humans creating it. I want to create organizations and culture that help humans scale their greatest desires and that comes from purpose, identity and support. The opportunity to work at Coinbase has been huge for me because the company is not financially constrained at all. Whenever I have had an idea, the company has fully funded my initiatives and given me full support to run at my fastest speed, from public speaking, driving partnerships, putting on diversity events, working on recruiting initiatives to financially sponsoring my Girls Who Code class. The company has rich financial coffers and not enough human power to deploy the capital so employees have stepped up and led grassroots efforts across the company. It’s very powerful to work at a company that values human growth and development so deeply. We know that to achieve the grand mission of Finance 2.0, we need to win the war on talent. That means attracting, retaining and growing the best engineers, product managers, execs, analysts etc. across the entire company. I personally am committed to helping Coinbase engineering become the best run engineering team in the world and to build a brand for ourselves so that top engineering minds know and want to work on the amazing technical problems we have. I am also committed to making Coinbase the best place for ambitious female engineers to grow their careers. The numbers don't look great right now; we don't have nearly enough women on the engineering team so how can we expect our user base to look any different? The mission of Finance 2.0 inspires me because it will help the unbanked and many people fund their first home, take out loans, invest in their education or entrepreneurship; it will also most help women since women tend to be left out of Finance 1.0 in greater percentages. If Coinbase is to achieve our mission of an open and free financial system, we need the best team representing many different world views. Many people ask--why female engineers? There are many people who are much needier. I agree but life is about ruthless prioritization and focus. My identity and experiences are that of a woman in tech. Being a professional woman can be daunting but there exists substantial literature for professional women e.g. Lean In, Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, The Confidence Code. These books are great and many have inspired me but there is something deeper to my career as a gender minority in the engineering space. I bond and connect with technical women at a faster rate because we have so many unsaid shared understandings. The identity speaks to me and because of the training and coaching I have received, I am best positioned to help motivated, talented technical women rise to the top. If a woman already has an in-demand hard skill, then I can provide many 80-20 tactics and strategies to help them win in their career. If I can help 200 women become prominent leaders in tech, then each one can in turn help another army of people succeed. We can make more diverse, empathetic products that reach beyond the mainstream. I promise that if Apple had more female leadership, there would be many more cutting-edge iPhones that comfortably fit my petite hands (I’m still on the iPhone SE). Helping fellow women in tech is the best way for me to scale myself, by targeting my cohort and figuring out the specific skills and action items to make us succeed. If you’re a female engineer, please reach out to me! Even if you know nothing about Coinbase or blockchain, I would still love the opportunity to connect. Whether you want to chat about career, management, negotiations, blockchain, overcoming your fears--I’m here for you. Please provide me some context though when you write--your background, what your career goals are, and what I can help you with. Also consider subscribing to my email list so I can keep you informed of events that I’m doing for Coinbase and women in tech.