Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Platform - Payments)

Coinbase Careers Page

3h•Hybrid

About The Position

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. About the team: At Coinbase, we’re on a mission to increase economic freedom in the world by building the most trusted platform for accessing the cryptoeconomy. The Payments Platform sits at the heart of that mission: it builds and scales the infrastructure that powers seamless movement between traditional fiat currencies and crypto, enabling customers to fund accounts, cash out, and move money reliably across the globe. Our team owns a large portfolio of critical services and components across payment methods, payment lifecycle orchestration, gateways, risk and review flows, and supporting tooling, operating at a scale of billions of dollars in transaction volume. We’re transforming this surface into a world‑class, multi‑tenant payments platform that is simple for product teams to build on, highly reliable, and efficient to operate. This role is for an AI‑first Senior Staff Engineer who will help define and drive that transformation.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in software engineering
Deep experience building and scaling distributed systems in production—owning availability, performance, and correctness for mission‑critical services at meaningful scale (e.g., multi‑region, high‑throughput, low‑latency systems).
Proven platformization track record: you’ve led efforts to turn fragmented services and bespoke integrations into coherent, reusable platforms or paved roads (e.g., shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi‑tenant architectures) that materially improved developer velocity and reliability for multiple teams.
AI‑first engineering mindset:
Hands‑on experience applying AI/ML to engineering problems (such as observability, anomaly detection, incident response, code analysis, or developer productivity tooling), or a demonstrably strong foundation and clear point of view on how to do this well.
Comfort evaluating and integrating AI‑powered tools into the everyday workflows of engineers and operators.
Strong architectural and design skills: you can take ambiguous, cross‑functional problems and develop clear architectures, tradeoff frameworks, and roadmaps that align multiple teams and stakeholders.
Operational excellence mindset: experience defining SLOs, building robust monitoring and alerting, leading high‑severity incident response, and driving systemic improvements from postmortems across several teams or domains.
Collaborative leadership: history of influencing across teams and organizations (not just within your immediate team), partnering effectively with PM, Design, Risk, Compliance, Data, and Operations to land complex initiatives.
Technical mentorship and thought leadership:
Demonstrated ability to grow other senior engineers through mentorship, design feedback, and setting technical direction.
Comfortable representing your area in org‑level forums and driving consensus on high‑impact technical decisions.
Payments or financial systems experience is a strong plus: familiarity with card networks, bank transfers, alternative payment methods, reconciliation, risk controls, or regulatory constraints—but we’re open to exceptional platform engineers from adjacent domains who are excited to go deep in payments.

Nice To Haves

Experience in crypto, fintech, or other highly regulated industries, especially where safety, compliance, and user trust are paramount.
Prior work building multi‑tenant or internal developer platforms that serve many product teams, including self‑service tooling, documentation, and migration strategies.
Hands‑on work with Golang or similar languages used at Coinbase, and with modern cloud‑native stacks (container orchestration, service meshes, messaging systems, event‑driven architectures).

Responsibilities

Define and drive the Payments Platform architecture across a broad surface area of services, APIs, and integrations—consolidating legacy flows into a cohesive, multi‑tenant platform that other teams can build on safely and quickly.
Lead large, cross‑team platformization initiatives (often multi‑quarter), such as API unification, workflow consolidation, and shared frameworks for payment methods, risk, and compliance, with measurable impact on reliability, latency, and developer velocity.
Scale complex distributed systems that process high‑volume, high‑reliability payment traffic—designing for fault isolation, graceful degradation, strong observability, and clear SLOs for Tier‑0/Tier‑1 services.
Be an AI‑first technical leader:
Systematically apply AI/ML (including modern generative AI tooling) to developer workflows, operational excellence, and reliability (e.g., intelligent runbooks, anomaly detection, automated remediation, better on‑call ergonomics).
Help set standards for how our engineering org uses AI safely and effectively in the SDLC (design, coding, testing, rollout, operations).
Partner with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate ambiguous business and regulatory requirements into clear technical strategies and platform capabilities, balancing speed, safety, and long‑term leverage.
Own end‑to‑end delivery of critical, company‑level initiatives—from problem definition and architecture/design reviews through implementation, rollout, incident readiness, and long‑term maintenance and evolution.
Raise the engineering bar across Payments and adjacent orgs by:
Establishing and evangelizing paved roads, design patterns, and best practices for payments domain modeling, reliability, testing, and observability.
Leading design reviews, incident postmortems, and quality initiatives for multiple teams.
Mentor and multiply:
Coach engineers and collaborate closely with engineering managers to grow technical leadership capacity across the organization.
Help build a strong hiring bar for AI‑first, platform‑minded engineers through interviews, rubric refinement, and onboarding practices.