Senior Staff Software Engineer, Payments

Details

At Coinbase you will work on the Payments Platform that defines how fiat moves into and out of Coinbase across 50+ countries and payment rails. The company is remote-first (but not remote-only) and expects quarterly in-person working sessions called “surges.”

Role overview

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Payments Platform team in the Platform group you will define the engineering vision for payments: rails integrations, orchestration, routing, and funds-flow systems. You will shape architectural cohesion across rails and funds-flow, drive platform-level reliability and cost efficiency, and prepare the platform for significant payment volume growth.

Responsibilities

• Own the multi-quarter technical strategy for Payments spanning rails integrations, orchestration, routing, and funds-flow services to support new products, geographies, and growth.
• Architect the core Payments platform for high availability, low latency, and cost efficiency at global scale; enforce technical standards for financial correctness including idempotency, reconciliation, failure-mode handling, and auditability across money-movement paths.
• Lead end-to-end design and rollout of large cross-team initiatives (new global rails, platform decompositions, resiliency programs); break ambiguity into clear milestones and measurable outcomes.
• Partner with FinHub, Payments Risk, Regulatory Platform, and Product to design cohesive architectures balancing customer experience, risk controls, compliance, and unit economics.
• Drive systematic reliability and efficiency improvements using observability signals (success rates, latency, cost, incident patterns) to identify and resolve structural platform gaps.
• Represent Payments in executive and cross-org forums; communicate tradeoffs, align stakeholders, and mentor senior/staff engineers on system design quality and long-term maintainability.

Requirements

• 12+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production, with deep money-movement architecture experience (PSPs, ISO 20022, routing, double-entry, high-volume payment systems).
• Deep expertise in backend programming (examples listed: Go, Python, Java) and cloud-native architecture, with a proven track record designing highly available, high-performance financial systems.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional technical initiatives spanning multiple teams, anticipate scaling bottlenecks, and drive platform improvements.
• Experience with ledgering, reconciliation, or settlement systems at scale and strong financial acumen for handling accounting data and high-precision transactions.
• Proven ability to distill complex technical concepts into clear, actionable solutions for engineering and executive audiences.
• Responsible use of generative AI to deliver business-ready outputs while maintaining human oversight and improving workflows, cost, and quality.

Compensation & benefits

• Annual base salary range (excluding equity and bonus): $253,895 — $298,700 USD (base varies by location).
• Total compensation may also include equity, bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)).

Additional information

• Application limit: candidates may submit a maximum of 3 applications within a 6-month period.
• Coinbase is an Equal Opportunity Employer and provides accommodations for applicants with disabilities (email accommodations[at]coinbase.com).
• US applicants: Employee Rights, Know Your Rights, and E-Verify notice information provided in the posting.
• Coinbase is piloting AI tools for initial screening interviews and interview intelligence; AI will not be used to make employment decisions.