Staff Software Engineer (Platform - Access & Authorization)

ABOUT THE ROLE We are seeking a talented Staff Software Engineer to join our Access & Authorization team within the Platform group at Coinbase. As a key member of our team, you will play a critical role in shaping the systems our customers use to securely access Coinbase. This is an exciting opportunity to design foundational authentication and authorization capabilities that balance strong security with a simple experience, creating leverage across every Coinbase product and partner integration. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be responsible for owning end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of capabilities across authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, account recovery, and edge authorization. You will build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services used across Coinbase's web, mobile, API, and partner experiences, with strong observability, failure testing, and measurable SLOs. You will also lead technical designs for complex initiatives such as signed authorization tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth. Additionally, you will partner with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to balance customer conversion, account protection, regulatory requirements, and engineering constraints. You will simplify integration patterns and build self-service tooling that enables product teams to adopt access and authorization capabilities safely at scale. Furthermore, you will mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through design reviews, pairing, code reviews, and on-call participation. WHAT YOU'LL NEED To be successful in this role, you will need to have 8+ years of backend software engineering experience with strong proficiency in Go or a comparable systems-oriented language, including building and operating reliable, high-throughput distributed services in production. You will also need to have demonstrated experience designing secure APIs and reasoning about authentication, authorization, session management, trust boundaries, and token handling (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE, or related standards). Additionally, you will need to have proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores such as Redis or DynamoDB, with strong operational instincts using metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and SLOs to run critical services. You will also need to have a track record of delivering complex, cross-functional projects from technical design through production rollout, with clear written and verbal communication that aligns engineering, security, product, and infrastructure partners. Furthermore, you will need 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, and as a Staff Software Engineer, you will have the flexibility to work from anywhere. However, you will be required to participate in quarterly in-person working sessions called “surges” to collaborate with your team and contribute to the company's mission. BENEFITS Coinbase offers a competitive total compensation package, including an annual base salary range of $218,025 - $256,500 USD, as well as equity and bonus eligibility. Additionally, Coinbase offers a range of benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and 401(k) plans.