Staff Software Enginer, Backend - Payments Platform

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Payments team at Coinbase, you own the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for the payments platform that powers fiat on- and off-ramps for individual and institutional customers. You process billions of dollars in transaction volume across global markets, 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 and 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 organisations
• 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

What you bring

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including hands-on experience building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional platforms
• A demonstrated track record of architecting and delivering fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems at scale, with experience processing billions of dollars in transaction volume
• Experience leading platform-building efforts that transformed fragmented services into coherent, reusable systems such as shared frameworks, unified APIs, or multi-tenant architectures
• Proven experience owning production reliability, leading high-severity incident response, and driving systemic improvements across multiple teams or domains
• A history of influencing technical direction across teams and organisations without direct authority, including representing your area in org-level architecture and strategy forums
• 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 range of $218,025-$256,500 USD (varies by location)
• Equity and bonus eligibility
• Benefits including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k)
• Remote-first work with quarterly in-person working sessions called "surges"

About Coinbase

Coinbase is a platform for individual and institutional customers to buy, sell, and use crypto. The company is mission-driven to increase economic freedom in the world.