Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Payments Platform

Details

Coinbase is a remote-first company focused on increasing economic freedom. The Payments team within the Platform organization builds and operates the infrastructure, workflows, and APIs that power fiat on- and off-ramps for individual and institutional customers, processing billions of dollars in transaction volume across global markets. Coinbase expects in-person quarterly working sessions called “surges.”

Responsibilities

• Own the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for the Payments platform, defining the roadmap for scaling integrations, routing, and funds-flow systems across global markets.
• Build and evolve distributed systems that process high-volume payment traffic, designing for fault isolation, graceful degradation, observability, and clear SLOs for Tier-0/Tier-1 services.
• Drive engineering quality by establishing paved roads, shared frameworks, and coding standards that elevate the technical bar across the Payments team and adjacent orgs.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate ambiguous business requirements into well-scoped technical solutions that balance speed, safety, and regulatory needs.
• Lead high-stakes scaling and reliability initiatives, anticipate bottlenecks, and drive systematic improvements from incident postmortems.
• Strengthen team capabilities through hands-on mentorship, design reviews, and architectural guidance.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including hands-on experience building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional platforms.
• Demonstrated track record of architecting and delivering fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems at scale, with experience processing billions of dollars in transaction volume.
• Experience leading platform-building efforts that transformed fragmented services into coherent, reusable systems (shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi-tenant architectures).
• Proven experience owning production reliability, leading high-severity incident response, and driving systemic improvements across multiple teams or domains.
• History of influencing technical direction across teams and organizations without direct authority, including representing your area in org-level architecture and strategy forums.
• Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.

Compensation

• Annual base salary range (excluding equity and bonus): $218,025 - $256,500 USD. Total compensation may also include equity, bonus eligibility, and benefits.

Additional details

• Location: Remote - USA (remote-first, not remote-only; quarterly in-person "surges").
• Job #: P77339
• Coinbase is an Equal Opportunity Employer and provides accommodations for applicants with disabilities. The posting includes additional US applicant notices and information about candidate privacy and arbitration.

Benefits

• Benefits mentioned include medical, dental, vision, and 401(k). Equity and bonus eligibility are also noted.