Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Platform (Payment Rails)

ABOUT THE ROLE We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payment Rails team within the Platform organization at Coinbase. As a key member of our team, you'll shape the architecture of our payment network, designing and scaling systems that ensure every payment is reliable, efficient, and correct. You'll work on powering fiat on- and off-ramps for individual and institutional customers, moving hundreds of billions of dollars in transaction volume each year. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll own the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for scaling Payment Rails' partner integrations and routing across markets and payment options. Your responsibilities will include: - Building 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 an AI-first approach to engineering workflows, identifying where AI-powered tools can accelerate development, improve code quality, and enhance operational efficiency. - Partnering with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate ambiguous business requirements into technical solutions that balance speed, safety, and regulatory needs. - Leading high-stakes scaling initiatives, anticipating bottlenecks before they occur and driving systematic improvements to how Coinbase moves money. - Strengthening the engineering bar by establishing paved roads, design patterns, and best practices, and by mentoring engineers through design reviews and coding standards. WHAT YOU'LL NEED To succeed in this role, you'll need: - 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional systems. - A demonstrated track record of architecting fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems that handle billions of dollars in transaction volume. - Experience leading efforts to turn fragmented services into coherent, reusable platforms (e.g., shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi-tenant architectures). - Proven ownership of production reliability, including leading high-severity incident response and driving systemic improvements from postmortems. - A history of influencing across teams without direct authority, driving consensus on high-impact technical decisions, and representing your area in org-level forums. - The ability to utilize 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" where you'll have the opportunity to collaborate with your colleagues in person. As a remote employee, you'll have the flexibility to work from anywhere while still being part of a dynamic and innovative team. BENEFITS Coinbase offers a competitive annual base salary range of $218,025 - $256,500, as well as equity and bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)).