Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Platform (Payment Rails)

Details

Coinbase is hiring a Staff Software Engineer, Backend to join the Payment Rails team within the Platform organization. Payment Rails is the foundational infrastructure that powers fiat and crypto money movement at Coinbase, processing very high-volume transaction traffic. The role is remote in the United States (remote-first, but in-person participation and offsites are required throughout the year).

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for Payment Rails: design APIs, orchestration layers, and integrations to consolidate fragmented payment flows into a cohesive, multi-tenant platform.
• Build and scale complex distributed systems that process high-volume, high-reliability payment traffic; design for fault isolation, graceful degradation, strong observability, and clear SLOs for Tier-0/Tier-1 services.
• Drive an AI-first approach to engineering workflows; identify where AI-powered tools can accelerate development, improve code quality, and enhance operational efficiency across the team and org.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate ambiguous business requirements into well-scoped technical solutions balancing speed, safety, and regulatory requirements.
• Lead scaling initiatives and define technical direction for how Coinbase moves money; anticipate bottlenecks and drive proactive, systematic improvements.
• Establish paved roads, design patterns, and best practices to raise engineering quality across Payment Rails and adjacent teams through mentorship, design reviews, and process improvements.
• Mentor and train team members on design techniques and coding standards.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering.
• Experience building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional systems.
• Demonstrated experience designing and building fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems at scale (handling billions of dollars in transaction volume).
• Platform-builder mindset: led efforts to turn fragmented services and bespoke integrations into coherent, reusable platforms (shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi-tenant architectures).
• Strong operational excellence: ownership of production reliability, leading high-severity incident response, and driving systemic improvements from postmortems across multiple teams or domains.
• Collaborative leadership: history of influencing across teams and organizations without direct authority and driving consensus on high-impact technical decisions.
• Demonstrated ability to responsibly use generative AI tools and copilots (examples cited: LibreChat, Gemini, Glean) in daily workflows, applying human-in-the-loop practices to deliver business-ready outputs and measurable improvements.

Nice to haves

• Experience with payment processors, banking integrations, or payment gateways (examples cited: Stripe, Plaid, SWIFT, ACH, SEPA, card networks).
• Background in crypto or blockchain technologies, including familiarity with stablecoin transfers, on-chain settlements, or cross-chain payment flows.
• Experience working in highly regulated industries (fintech or financial services) where safety, compliance, and user trust are paramount.

Pay Transparency

• Annual base salary range (excluding equity and bonus): $218,025 — $256,500 USD.

Additional details

• Job #: P76350
• Coinbase notes remote-first culture but requires in-person participation (team and company-wide offsites multiple times annually). The posting includes equal opportunity and applicant privacy notices, participation in E-Verify in certain locations, and an AI disclosure about piloted interview tools.