Senior Staff Software Engineer, Payments

Details

Coinbase is a remote-first, but not remote-only company. Employees are expected to meet quarterly for in-person working sessions called “surges.”

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Platform Payments team, you will define the engineering vision for how fiat moves into and out of Coinbase across more than 50 countries and payment rails. The team builds and operates fiat on- and off-ramps, routing, orchestration, and funds-flow services that power customer-facing payment experiences. You will own the multi-quarter technical strategy, architect for global scale and reliability, and drive platform-level improvements affecting payment success rates, latency, and cost efficiency.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the multi-quarter technical strategy for Payments across rails, orchestration, and transfers to support new products, geographies, and significant growth in payment volume.
• 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 rails, decompositions and migrations, and resiliency programs, breaking ambiguity into clear milestones and measurable outcomes.
• Set and enforce technical standards for financial correctness across Payments, including idempotency, reconciliation, failure-mode handling, and auditability for all money-movement paths.
• Partner with FinHub, Payments Risk, Regulatory Platform, and Product to design cohesive 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.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Deep expertise in backend programming, such as Go, Java, or Python, and cloud-native architecture.
• Deep money-movement architecture experience, including PSPs, ISO 20022, routing, double-entry ledgering, and high-volume payment systems.
• Proven experience designing highly available, high-performance systems and proactively addressing scaling bottlenecks.
• Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives across multiple engineering teams and mentoring senior engineers in system design and long-term maintainability.
• Ability to communicate complex technical tradeoffs clearly to executive and cross-organizational stakeholders and secure alignment on high-impact technical decisions.
• Responsible use of generative AI with human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.

Compensation

• Annual base salary: $253,895–$298,700 USD, excluding equity and bonus.
• Total compensation may also include equity, bonus eligibility, and medical, dental, vision, and 401(k) benefits.
• Job ID: P77633

Additional Information

• Candidates may submit a maximum of three applications within a six-month period.
• Coinbase is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
• Reasonable accommodations are available for applicants with disabilities.