Staff Backend Software Engineer (Payments Platform)

About this role

• We’re hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payments team within the Platform organization
• The Payments team builds and operates the infrastructure, workflows, and APIs that power fiat on- and off-ramps for individual and institutional customers, processing billions of dollars in transaction volume across a growing set of global markets
• You’ll own the architecture and technical direction of these systems, ensuring every payment is reliable, scalable, and correct as Coinbase expands into new regions and payment methods
• Own 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
• 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
• Drive engineering quality by establishing paved roads, shared frameworks, and coding standards that elevate the technical bar across the Payments team and adjacent orgs
• Partner 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
• Lead high-stakes scaling and reliability initiatives, anticipating bottlenecks before they occur and driving systematic improvements from incident postmortems
• Strengthen team capabilities through hands-on mentorship, design reviews, and architectural guidance that accelerate the growth of engineers across the team

• History of influencing technical direction across teams and organizations without direct authority, including representing your area in org-level architecture and strategy forums
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including hands-on experience building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional platforms
• Utilizes generative AI responsibly...