Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Payments Platform

Details

Coinbase is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payments team within the Platform organization. The team builds and operates the infrastructure, workflows, and APIs powering fiat on- and off-ramps for individual and institutional customers, processing billions of dollars in transaction volume across global markets.

The role owns the architecture and technical direction of these systems, ensuring that payments are reliable, scalable, and correct as Coinbase expands into new regions and payment methods. Coinbase is remote-first but not remote-only, with quarterly in-person 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 and Tier-1 services.
• Establish paved roads, shared frameworks, and coding standards that improve engineering quality across the Payments team and adjacent organizations.
• Partner 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, anticipating bottlenecks and driving systematic improvements based on incident postmortems.
• Strengthen team capabilities through hands-on mentorship, design reviews, and architectural guidance.

Requirements

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

Compensation

• Annual base salary: $218,025–$256,500 USD, excluding equity and bonus.
• Total compensation may also include equity, bonus eligibility, and medical, dental, vision, and 401(k) benefits.

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.
• US applicants are subject to the Candidate Privacy Notice and arbitration agreement.