Senior Staff Software Engineer, Payments

at Coinbase

📍 Canada

USD 253,900-298,700 per year

SENIOR

✅ Remote

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

Compliance @ 4 Distributed Systems @ 8 Go @ 6 Java @ 6 Mentoring @ 4 Observability Payments @ 4 Python @ 6

Details

Coinbase is seeking a deep technical leader to define the engineering vision for its Payments organization. Payments Platform moves traditional fiat into crypto and powers financial access and payments for the crypto economy globally through fiat on- and off-ramps and payment services.

The company is remote-first but not remote-only, with quarterly in-person working sessions called “surges.”

Responsibilities

Define and drive the multi-quarter technical strategy for Payments across payment rails, orchestration, and transfers to support new products, geographies, and significant payment-volume growth.
Architect and evolve the core Payments platform, including rail integrations, routing, and funds-flow services, for high availability, low latency, and cost efficiency at global scale.
Lead the end-to-end design and rollout of large, cross-team initiatives, such as new global payment rails, decommissions and migrations, and resiliency programs.
Break high-ambiguity initiatives into clear milestones and measurable outcomes.
Set and enforce technical standards for financial correctness, including idempotency, reconciliation, failure-mode handling, and auditability across money-movement paths.
Partner with FinHub, Payments Risk, Regulatory Platform, and Product to design architectures that balance customer experience, risk controls, compliance, and unit economics.
Provide deep technical mentorship to senior and staff engineers across Payments pods, improving system design quality, review rigor, and long-term maintainability.
Use data and observability signals, including success rates, latency, cost, and incident patterns, to identify platform gaps and lead reliability and efficiency improvements.
Represent Payments in executive and cross-organizational forums, communicate tradeoffs, align stakeholders on strategy, and secure support for high-impact technical initiatives.

Requirements

10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
Deep money-movement architecture experience, including PSPs, ISO 20022, routing, double-entry systems, and high-volume payment systems.
Deep expertise in backend programming, such as Python, Go, or Java, and cloud-native architecture.
Proven experience designing highly available, high-performance systems.
Ability to anticipate scaling bottlenecks and take proactive measures.
Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives and mentoring senior engineers.
Commitment to technical excellence, sharing best practices, and fostering a strong engineering culture.
Ability to distill complex technical concepts into clear, actionable solutions.

Nice to Have

Experience designing and operating large-scale ledgering or trading systems.
Strong financial acumen and experience handling accounting data and financial transactions with high precision and reliability.
Experience collaborating closely with finance and accounting teams.

Compensation

The annual base salary range is $253,895–$298,700 USD, excluding equity and bonus. Total compensation may also include equity, bonus eligibility, and medical, dental, and vision benefits.