Staff Software Engineer (Platform - Identity)
Ready to be pushed beyond what you think you’re capable of?
At Coinbase, our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world. It’s a massive, ambitious opportunity that demands the best of us, every day, as we build the emerging onchain platform — and with it, the future global financial system.
To achieve our mission, we’re seeking a very specific candidate. We want someone who is passionate about our mission and who believes in the power of crypto and blockchain technology to update the financial system. We want someone who is eager to leave their mark on the world, who relishes the pressure and privilege of working with high caliber colleagues, and who actively seeks feedback to keep leveling up. We want someone who will run towards, not away from, solving the company’s hardest problems.
Our work culture is intense and isn’t for everyone. But if you want to build the future alongside others who excel in their disciplines and expect the same from you, there’s no better place to be.
While many roles at Coinbase are remote-first, we are not remote-only. In-person participation is required throughout the year. Team and company-wide offsites are held multiple times annually to foster collaboration, connection, and alignment. Attendance is expected and fully supported.
We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Identity Accounts team — the platform foundation that powers every user, organization, and account at Coinbase. This is one of the most visible and business-critical engineering platforms at the company: your team's services handle authentication, authorization, security settings, and account management for millions of customers across every Coinbase product. You'll be the lead across three sub-teams (Foundations, Users Platformization, and Settings & Account Management), drive roadmap execution in close partnership with your Engineering and Product Manager, and represent the team to 20+ internal product groups and key partners in Security, Risk, Compliance, and Design. If you thrive at the intersection of deep technical problems and cross-functional leadership, this role is for you.
What you’ll be doing:
- Drive roadmap execution across three focused sub-teams: Foundations (authorization infrastructure), Users Platformization (decomposing the legacy monolith), and Settings & Account Management (Security Settings 2.0, account navigation redesign).
- Own reliability and operational excellence for 8+ mission-critical Tier-0/Tier-1 services — maintaining 99.99% uptime, championing engineering quality, and acting as quarterback during high-severity incidents.
- Represent the team to internal product groups and key partners in Security, Risk, Compliance, and Design — building alignment and ensuring seamless integration support.
- Partner with Product and your EM to define strategic roadmaps, prioritize initiatives, and translate complex constraints into simple, scalable platform solutions.
- Champion engineering excellence — drive code and design reviews, set engineering standards, and build every capability to be composable and reusable across product lines (no bespoke, one-off integrations).
- Accelerate internal customers by reducing new product team onboarding time to under 2 weeks and delivering excellent APIs, clear documentation, and strong integration support.
What we look for in you:
- 8+ years of software engineering experience
- Demonstrated track record of architecting and delivering systems at scale — high-throughput, high-availability services serving millions of requests in production
- Proven experience leading AI/LLM product development — building AI agents, code generation systems, or developer-facing AI tooling in production environments
- Strong command of Go, gRPC, Kubernetes, and service mesh architectures
- Ability to drive technical clarity in ambiguous, high-stakes situations — you can take a vague problem ("compliance teams can't self-serve"), define the right solution space, and execute it to completion
- A history of influencing across organizational boundaries — getting buy-in from skeptical stakeholders, aligning competing priorities, and building durable cross-team partnerships
- Excellent written and verbal communication — you produce technical design documents that build organizational confidence and create shared understanding
- Based in or able to commute to NYC or SF, with willingness to work from the tech hub once or twice a week or on an as-needed basis for architecture reviews, stakeholder meetings, and team offsites
Nice to haves:
- Experience in identity, authentication, authorization, or account management systems.
- Prior experience leading a Platform team or similar domain with high internal customer dependency.
- Familiarity with our stack: Go, gRPC, React, SpiceDB, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Datadog.
- Background building financial, high-reliability, or security systems.
Job #: P76788
Pay Transparency Notice: Depending on your work location, the target annual base salary for this position can range as detailed below. Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility and benefits (including medical, dental, vision and 401(k)).
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