Staff Software Engineer - Payments Platform

At Coinbase, we are uncompromising on our mission to increase economic freedom. Coinbase is a remote-first, high-intensity environment where teams gather quarterly for focused, in-person working sessions called "Surges."

We are hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payments team within the Platform organization. The Payments team builds and operates the core infrastructure, workflows, and APIs that power fiat on- and off-ramps for individual and institutional customers, processing billions of dollars in transaction volume across global markets. You will own the architecture and multi-year technical direction of these Tier-0/Tier-1 systems, ensuring every transaction is reliable, fault-tolerant, and compliant as Coinbase expands globally.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Strategy & Architecture: Own the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for the Payments platform, defining the long-term roadmap for scaling payment routing, integrations, and funds-flow systems.
• High-Volume Distributed Systems: Architect and evolve resilient distributed systems processing high-volume payment traffic, designing for fault isolation, graceful degradation, observability, and strict SLOs.
• Engineering Standards & Frameworks: Drive technical quality by establishing paved roads, shared frameworks, and coding standards that elevate the engineering bar across the organization.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate complex business and regulatory goals into scalable technical architectures.
• Reliability & Scaling: Lead high-stakes scaling and reliability initiatives, anticipating system bottlenecks before they impact customers and driving systemic improvements from incident postmortems.
• Technical Mentorship: Accelerate the growth of engineers across the org through hands-on architectural guidance, design reviews, and engineering leadership.

Requirements

Experience & Education

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Deep hands-on experience architecting and operating payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional platforms processing billions in volume.

Technical Capabilities & Distributed Systems

• Proven track record of building fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems operating at global scale.
• Demonstrated experience leading platform efforts that transform fragmented microservices into unified, reusable systems (e.g., shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi-tenant architectures).
• Proven ownership of production reliability, leading high-severity incident response, and driving systemic postmortem actions across teams.
• History of influencing technical strategy and architecture across organizations without direct authority.

Modern Workflows & AI Utilization

• Responsible utilization of generative AI tools and workflows to enhance development velocity, system observability, and operational quality.

Benefits & Workplace Perks

• Compensation: Competitive base salary, equity options, and performance bonus eligibility.
• Health Coverage: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance plans.
• Retirement Savings: 401(k) retirement savings plan with company options.
• Flexibility & Surges: Remote-first work flexibility paired with quarterly in-person team collaboration "surges."