Staff Software Enginer, Backend - Payments Platform

Coinbase

5h•$218,025 - $256,500

About The Position

Coinbase is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for the Payments team within the Platform organization. The team builds and operates infrastructure, workflows, and APIs for fiat on- and off-ramps serving individual and institutional customers. Its systems process billions of dollars in transaction volume across global markets. The role owns the architecture and technical direction of these systems, with a focus on reliable, scalable, and correct payments as Coinbase expands into new regions and payment methods. Coinbase is remote-first but not remote-only; employees are expected to meet quarterly for in-person working sessions called “surges.”

Requirements

At least 8 years of software engineering experience, including hands-on experience building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional platforms.
Demonstrated experience architecting and delivering fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems at scale, including experience processing billions of dollars in transaction volume.
Track record of leading platform-building efforts that transform fragmented services into coherent, reusable systems, such as shared frameworks, unified APIs, or multi-tenant architectures.
Experience owning production reliability, leading high-severity incident response, and driving systemic improvements across multiple teams or domains.
Experience influencing technical direction across teams and organizations without direct authority, including representing an area in organization-level architecture and strategy forums.
Uses generative AI responsibly, with human oversight, to deliver business-ready outputs and measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.

Responsibilities

Own the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for the Payments platform, including roadmaps 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/Tier-1 services.
Establish paved roads, shared frameworks, and coding standards to improve engineering quality across the Payments team and adjacent organizations.
Partner with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to turn ambiguous business requirements into well-scoped technical solutions that balance speed, safety, and regulatory needs.
Lead scaling and reliability initiatives, anticipate bottlenecks, and drive systematic improvements based on incident postmortems.
Mentor engineers through hands-on guidance, design reviews, and architectural guidance.