Senior Staff Software Engineer, Platform - IAM

Details

Coinbase is hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer, also described as an Uber Tech Lead, for Identity and Access Management within the Platform organization. This remote-first role owns the technical strategy for unifying human, AI agent, service, and workload identity into one coherent platform across more than 700 internal systems. The role sets architecture across multiple pods, drives adoption across hundreds of engineering teams, and serves as a senior technical voice for identity and access management.

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

Responsibilities

• Own the multi-year technical strategy for IAM, including architecture that unifies workforce, AI agent, and service/workload identity under a common model.
• Define shared primitives for authentication, authorization, provisioning, and governance.
• Drive architecture decisions across multiple pods and teams without direct management authority.
• Establish standards, review criteria, and integration contracts for engineering teams.
• Develop the adoption strategy for more than 700 systems, including sequencing, migration paths, and build-versus-buy decisions.
• Partner with Security, Compliance, IT, Infrastructure, and product engineering leadership to translate UAR, SOX, and SOC 2 requirements into automated controls and self-generating evidence.
• Lead the data model and tooling that explain who has access to what and why across a heterogeneous technology estate.
• Reduce standing privilege while making secure workflows efficient.
• Mentor staff and senior engineers and increase the organization’s expertise in identity as a domain.

Requirements

• 12 or more years of software engineering experience.
• A track record as the most senior technical leader on a platform spanning multiple teams, with multi-year architecture successfully adopted across dozens of consuming teams.
• Deep IAM expertise across more than one domain, such as workforce identity, authorization, access lifecycle, or non-human identity.
• Substantive experience with service or workload identity, including service-to-service authentication, workload identity federation, or machine credential management at scale.
• Production experience with Go.
• Distributed systems design experience on AWS.
• Fluency in identity protocols and standards including OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, and workload identity patterns.
• Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders without direct authority and change the technical direction of teams and organizations.
• Ability to translate audit and regulatory requirements into automated technical controls.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills for explaining complex identity problems to executive audiences.
• Responsible use of generative AI with human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and improve workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.

Compensation

Annual base salary ranges from $253,895 to $298,700 USD, excluding equity and bonus. Total compensation may also include equity, bonus eligibility, and medical, dental, vision, and 401(k) benefits.

Candidates may submit a maximum of three applications within a six-month period. Coinbase is an Equal Opportunity Employer. US applicants are subject to applicable employee rights, E-Verify, data privacy, and arbitration notices.