Staff Software Engineer (Platform - Access & Authorization)

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

What you'll do

• Own end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of capabilities across authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, 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

What you bring

• 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 (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE, or related standards)
• Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores such as Redis or DynamoDB, with 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, with clear written and verbal communication that aligns engineering, security, product, and infrastructure partners
• The ability to utilise generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality

What we offer

• Annual base salary of $218,025-$256,500 USD (varies by location)
• Equity and bonus eligibility
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits
• 401(k) plan
• Remote-first work with quarterly in-person working sessions called "surges"

About Coinbase

Coinbase is a platform for economic freedom, building secure systems that increase access to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. The company operates with a remote-first culture and brings teams together quarterly for intensive in-person collaboration.