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Salary: USD 218,025 - 256,500 / annual
Coinbase is 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.
In this role, you will 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. You'll 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.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning the technical strategy and architecture for the Payments platform, with a focus on scaling integrations, routing, and funds-flow systems globally
- Building and evolving distributed systems designed for high-volume payment traffic with fault isolation, graceful degradation, and clear SLOs
- Driving engineering quality by establishing paved roads, shared frameworks, and coding standards across the Payments team and adjacent organizations
- Partnering cross-functionally with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate business requirements into well-scoped technical solutions
- Leading high-stakes scaling and reliability initiatives, anticipating bottlenecks and driving systematic improvements from incident postmortems
- Strengthening team capabilities through hands-on mentorship, design reviews, and architectural guidance
Coinbase is a remote-first, but not remote-only company. Expect to get together quarterly for intense in-person working sessions called "surges."
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, including hands-on experience building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional platforms
- Demonstrated track record 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
- History of influencing technical direction across teams and organizations without direct authority, including representing your area in org-level architecture and strategy forums
- Ability to utilize generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality
