Staff Software Engineer Backend - Platform (Payment Rails)

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payment Rails team within Coinbase's Platform organization. Payment Rails is the foundational infrastructure that powers every fiat and crypto money movement at Coinbase—processing billions of dollars in transaction volume across payment methods gateways and settlement systems. In this role you'll own the architecture and technical direction of our payment rails infrastructure designing fault-tolerant high-reliability systems that enable seamless transfers at global scale while maintaining the safety and compliance standards our customers depend on.

What you’ll be doing (ie. job duties):

• Own the technical strategy architecture and roadmap for Payment Rails—designing APIs orchestration layers and integrations that consolidate fragmented payment flows into a cohesive multi-tenant platform other teams can build on.
• Build and scale complex distributed systems that process high-volume high-reliability payment traffic—designing for fault isolation graceful degradation strong observability and clear SLOs for Tier-0/Tier-1 services.
• Drive an AI-first approach to engineering workflows—identify where AI-powered tools can accelerate development improve code quality and enhance operational efficiency across the team and broader engineering org.
• 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 requirements.
• Lead high-stakes scaling initiatives and define the technical direction for how Coinbase moves money—anticipating bottlenecks before they occur and driving proactive systematic improvements.
• Raise the engineering bar across Payment Rails and adjacent orgs by establishing paved roads design patterns and best practices that elevate team technical quality through mentorship design reviews and process improvements.
• Mentor and train other team members on design techniques and coding standards

What we look for in you (ie. job requirements):

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering.
• Experience building payment systems financial infrastructure or high-volume transactional systems.
• You've designed and built fault-tolerant highly reliable distributed systems at scale—with a demonstrable track record of architecting systems that handle billions of dollars in transaction volume.
• Platform-builder mindset: you've led efforts to turn fragmented services and bespoke integrations into coherent reusable platforms (e.g. shared frameworks unified APIs multi-tenant architectures).
• Strong operational excellence: experience owning production reliability leading high-severity incident response and driving systemic improvements from postmortems across multiple teams or domains.
• Collaborative leadership: history of influencing across teams and organizations without direct authority driving consensus on high-impact technical decisions and representing your area in org-level forums.
• Demonstrates the ability to responsibly use generative AI tools and copilots (e.g. LibreChat Gemini Glean) in daily workflows continuously learn as tools evolve and apply human-in-the-loop practices to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in efficiency cost and quality.

Nice to haves:

• Experience with payment processors banking integrations or payment gateways (e.g. Stripe Plaid SWIFT ACH SEPA card networks).
• Background in crypto or blockchain technologies including familiarity with stablecoin transfers on-chain settlements or cross-chain payment flows.
• Experience working in highly regulated industries where safety compliance and user trust are paramount—particularly in fintech or financial services.

Job #: P76350

What We Do

Crypto creates economic freedom by ensuring that people can participate fairly in the economy and Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) is on a mission to increase economic freedom for more than 1 billion people. We’re updating the century-old financial system by providing a trusted platform that makes it easy for people and institutions to engage with crypto assets including trading staking safekeeping spending and fast free global transfers. We also provide critical infrastructure for onchain activity and support builders who share our vision that onchain is the new online. And together with the crypto community we advocate for responsible rules to make the benefits of crypto available around the world.

Why Work With Us

We have the opportunity to accelerate the pace of innovation in the world by building an open financial system. Our vision is to create more economic freedom in the world to help people control their own wealth start companies have financial privacy and participate in the global economy. And to get us there we focus build and move as a team.

Gallery