Staff Backend Software Engineer (Payments Platform)

Join Coinbase as a Staff Backend Software Engineer in the Payments team. You'll be responsible for the architecture and technical direction of the Payments platform, ensuring reliability, scalability, and correctness as Coinbase expands into new regions and payment methods. You'll build and evolve distributed systems, drive engineering quality, partner cross-functionally, lead scaling and reliability initiatives, and strengthen team capabilities through mentorship and guidance.

Architect and lead the technical direction of the Payments platform, ensuring reliability, scalability, and correctness as the company expands into new regions and payment methods.

USD 218,025 - 256,500

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve distributed systems that process high-volume payment traffic, designing for fault isolation, graceful degradation, observability, and clear service level objectives.
• Drive engineering quality by establishing paved roads, shared frameworks, and coding standards that elevate the technical bar across the Payments team and adjacent organizations.
• History of influencing technical direction across teams and organizations without direct authority, including representing your area in org-level architecture and strategy forums

Requirements

• 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, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality
• Demonstrated track record of architecting and delivering fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems at scale, with experience processing billions of dollars in transaction volume
• Led 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