Staff Software Engineer
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We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payments team within the Platform organization. The Payments team 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 a growing set of global markets. You'll own the architecture and technical direction of these systems, ensuring every payment is reliable, scalable, and correct as Coinbase expands into new regions and payment methods.
What you'll do:
- 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, anticipating bottlenecks before they occur and driving systematic improvements from incident postmortems.
- Strengthen team capabilities through hands-on mentorship, design reviews, and architectural guidance that accelerate the growth of engineers across the team.
Required Skills and Experience:
- 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.
- Led platform-building efforts that transformed fragmented services into coherent, reusable systems (e.g., 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.
Job # P77339
Pay Transparency Notice: Base salary varies by location (see range below). Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)).
Please be advised that each candidate may submit a maximum of four applications within any 30-day period. We encourage you to carefully evaluate how your skills and interests align with Coinbase's roles before applying.
Commitment to Equal Opportunity
Coinbase is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation or any other basis protected by applicable law. Coinbase will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. For US applicants, you may view the Employee Rights and the Know Your Rights notices by clicking on their corresponding links. Additionally, Coinbase participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law.
Coinbase is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation because of a disability for any part of the employment process, please contact us at accommodations[at]coinbase.com to let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. For quick access to screen reading technology compatible with this site click here to download a free compatible screen reader (free step by step tutorial can be found here).
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AI Disclosure
For select roles, Coinbase is piloting an AI tool based on machine learning technologies to conduct initial screening interviews to qualified applicants. The tool simulates realistic interview scenarios and engages in dynamic conversation. A human recruiter will review your interview responses, provided in the form of a voice recording and/or transcript, to assess them against the qualifications and characteristics outlined in the job description.
For select roles, Coinbase is also piloting an AI interview intelligence platform to transcribe and summarize interview notes, allowing our interviewers to fully focus on you as the candidate.
The above pilots are for testing purposes and Coinbase will not use AI to make decisions impacting employment. To request a reasonable accommodation due to disability, please contact accommodations[at]coinbase.com
- Medical Plan, Dental and Vision Plan with generous employee contributions
- Health Savings Account with company contributions each pay period
- Disability and Life Insurance
- 401(k) plan with company match
- Wellness Stipend
- Mobile/Internet Reimbursement
- Volunteer Time Off
- Fertility Counseling and Benefits
- Generous Time off/Leave Policy
- The option of getting paid in digital currency