Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Payments Platform

ABOUT THE ROLE We're seeking a highly skilled Staff Software Engineer to join the Payments team within the Platform organization at Coinbase. As a critical member of our team, you will own the architecture and technical direction of our payment systems, ensuring every payment is reliable, scalable, and correct as we expand into new regions and payment methods. WHAT YOU'LL DO You will be responsible for: - Owning 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. - Building and evolving distributed systems that process high-volume payment traffic, designing for fault isolation, graceful degradation, observability, and clear SLOs for Tier-0/Tier-1 services. - Driving engineering quality by establishing paved roads, shared frameworks, and coding standards that elevate the technical bar across the Payments team and adjacent orgs. - Partnering 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. - Leading high-stakes scaling and reliability initiatives, anticipating bottlenecks before they occur and driving systematic improvements from incident postmortems. - Strengthening team capabilities through hands-on mentorship, design reviews, and architectural guidance that accelerate the growth of engineers across the team. WHAT YOU'LL NEED To be successful in this role, you will need: - 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 (e.g., shared frameworks, unified APIs, 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 organizations without direct authority, including representing your area in org-level architecture and strategy forums. - Experience utilizing generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality. WHY REMOTE Coinbase is a remote-first company, with quarterly in-person working sessions called "surges" to bring the team together. As a remote employee, you will have the flexibility to work from anywhere while being part of a collaborative and dynamic team. BENEFITS Coinbase offers a competitive annual base salary range of $218,025 - $256,500 USD, as well as equity and bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)).