Senior Staff Software Engineer, Platform - IAM

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer for Identity and Access Management within Platform at Coinbase, you own the technical strategy that unifies human, AI agent, service, and workload identity into one coherent platform. IAM is a distributed problem across 700+ internal systems, so your platform must make access consistent, visible, provable, and efficient across every identity type. You'll set architecture across multiple pods, drive adoption with hundreds of engineering teams, and serve as one of the most senior technical voices for identity and access management at Coinbase.

What you'll do

• Own the multi-year technical strategy for IAM end to end, including the architecture that unifies workforce, AI agent, and service/workload identity under a common model with shared primitives for authentication, authorization, provisioning, and governance
• Drive architecture decisions across multiple pods and teams you don't manage, establishing the standards, review bars, and integration contracts the rest of engineering builds against
• Build the adoption strategy for 700+ systems, including sequencing, migration paths, and build-vs-buy decisions that determine what you own versus integrate
• Partner with Security, Compliance, IT, Infrastructure, and product engineering leadership to translate audit and regulatory requirements (UAR, SOX, SOC 2) into automated controls and self-generating evidence
• Lead the data model and tooling that answer "who has access to what, and why" across a heterogeneous estate, reducing standing privilege while making the secure path the fast path
• Grow the technical bench by mentoring staff and senior engineers and raising the organisation's depth in identity as a domain

What you bring

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including a track record as the most senior technical leader on a platform spanning multiple teams with multi-year architecture driven to adoption across dozens of consuming teams
• Deep IAM expertise across more than one domain (workforce identity, authorization, access lifecycle, or non-human identity) with substantive experience in service or workload identity, such as service-to-service auth, workload identity federation, or machine credential management at scale
• Production Go experience and distributed systems design on AWS, with fluency in identity protocols and standards (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, and workload identity patterns)
• Proven influence without authority at senior levels, having changed the technical direction of teams and organisations outside your own and secured leadership alignment on ambiguous, organisation-wide access-risk problems
• Ability to translate audit and regulatory requirements into automated technical controls, with clear written and verbal communication that frames complex identity problems for executive audiences
• Responsible use of generative AI, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality

What we offer

• Annual base salary range of $253,895-$298,700 USD (varies by location)
• Equity and bonus eligibility
• Medical, dental, vision, and 401(k) benefits
• Remote-first work with quarterly in-person working sessions called "surges"

About Coinbase

Coinbase is building the future of finance with a mission to increase economic freedom. The company operates a remote-first work model and brings teams together quarterly for intensive in-person collaboration.