Staff Software Engineer (Platform - Access & Authorization)

📍 United States

USD 218,000-256,500 per year

SENIOR

✅ Remote

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

AI @ 6 API @ 7 Communication @ 6 GenAI Generative AI @ 6 Go @ 7 OAuth @ 4 Observability @ 7 Redis @ 6 Security @ 4 gRPC @ 7

Details

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

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Access & Authorization team within the Platform group, you will help shape the systems customers use to securely access Coinbase. The team builds and operates distributed services at the intersection of security, identity, developer infrastructure, and customer experience. You will design foundational authentication and authorization capabilities that balance strong security with a simple experience, creating leverage across every Coinbase product and partner integration.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of capabilities across authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, two-factor authentication, account recovery, and edge authorization.
Build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services used across Coinbase’s web, mobile, API, and partner experiences, with strong observability, failure testing, and measurable SLOs.
Lead technical designs for complex initiatives such as signed authorization tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth.
Partner with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to balance customer conversion, account protection, regulatory requirements, and engineering constraints.
Simplify integration patterns and build self-service tooling that enables product teams to adopt access and authorization capabilities safely at scale.
Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through design reviews, pairing, code reviews, and on-call participation.

Requirements

8+ years of backend software engineering experience with strong proficiency in Go or a comparable systems-oriented language, including building and operating reliable, high-throughput distributed services in production.
Demonstrated experience designing secure APIs and reasoning about authentication, authorization, session management, trust boundaries, and token handling, including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE, or related standards.
Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores such as Redis or DynamoDB.
Strong operational instincts using metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and SLOs to run critical services.
A track record of delivering complex, cross-functional projects from technical design through production rollout.
Clear written and verbal communication for aligning engineering, security, product, and infrastructure partners.
Responsible use of generative AI with human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and improve workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.

Compensation

The annual base salary range is $218,025–$256,500 USD, excluding equity and bonus. Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility, as well as medical, dental, vision, and 401(k) benefits.

Candidates may submit a maximum of three applications within a six-month period.