Coinbase · 20 hours ago
Senior Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Platform - Payments)
United States
Full-time
Remote
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$254K/yr - $299K/yr
10+ years expCoinbase is on a mission to increase economic freedom in the world by building a trusted platform for accessing the cryptoeconomy. They are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to define and drive the Payments Platform architecture, scale complex distributed systems, and lead cross-team initiatives to enhance reliability and developer velocity.
BitcoinBlockchainCryptocurrencyFinTechTrading Platform
Responsibilities
Define and drive the Payments Platform architecture across a broad surface area of services, APIs, and integrations—consolidating legacy flows into a cohesive, multi‑tenant platform that other teams can build on safely and quickly
Lead large, cross‑team platformization initiatives (often multi‑quarter), such as API unification, workflow consolidation, and shared frameworks for payment methods, risk, and compliance, with measurable impact on reliability, latency, and developer velocity
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
Be an AI‑first technical leader: Systematically apply AI/ML (including modern generative AI tooling) to developer workflows, operational excellence, and reliability (e.g., intelligent runbooks, anomaly detection, automated remediation, better on‑call ergonomics). Help set standards for how our engineering org uses AI safely and effectively in the SDLC (design, coding, testing, rollout, operations)
Partner with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate ambiguous business and regulatory requirements into clear technical strategies and platform capabilities, balancing speed, safety, and long‑term leverage
Own end‑to‑end delivery of critical, company‑level initiatives—from problem definition and architecture/design reviews through implementation, rollout, incident readiness, and long‑term maintenance and evolution
Raise the engineering bar across Payments and adjacent orgs by: Establishing and evangelizing paved roads, design patterns, and best practices for payments domain modeling, reliability, testing, and observability. Leading design reviews, incident postmortems, and quality initiatives for multiple teams
Mentor and multiply: Coach engineers and collaborate closely with engineering managers to grow technical leadership capacity across the organization. Help build a strong hiring bar for AI‑first, platform‑minded engineers through interviews, rubric refinement, and onboarding practices
Qualification
Required
10+ years of experience in software engineering
Deep experience building and scaling distributed systems in production—owning availability, performance, and correctness for mission‑critical services at meaningful scale (e.g., multi‑region, high‑throughput, low‑latency systems)
Proven platformization track record: you've led efforts to turn fragmented services and bespoke integrations into coherent, reusable platforms or paved roads (e.g., shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi‑tenant architectures) that materially improved developer velocity and reliability for multiple teams
AI‑first engineering mindset: Hands‑on experience applying AI/ML to engineering problems (such as observability, anomaly detection, incident response, code analysis, or developer productivity tooling), or a demonstrably strong foundation and clear point of view on how to do this well
Comfort evaluating and integrating AI‑powered tools into the everyday workflows of engineers and operators
Strong architectural and design skills: you can take ambiguous, cross‑functional problems and develop clear architectures, tradeoff frameworks, and roadmaps that align multiple teams and stakeholders
Operational excellence mindset: experience defining SLOs, building robust monitoring and alerting, leading high‑severity incident response, and driving systemic improvements from postmortems across several teams or domains
Collaborative leadership: history of influencing across teams and organizations (not just within your immediate team), partnering effectively with PM, Design, Risk, Compliance, Data, and Operations to land complex initiatives
Technical mentorship and thought leadership: Demonstrated ability to grow other senior engineers through mentorship, design feedback, and setting technical direction
Comfortable representing your area in org‑level forums and driving consensus on high‑impact technical decisions
Payments or financial systems experience is a strong plus: familiarity with card networks, bank transfers, alternative payment methods, reconciliation, risk controls, or regulatory constraints—but we're open to exceptional platform engineers from adjacent domains who are excited to go deep in payments
Preferred
Experience in crypto, fintech, or other highly regulated industries, especially where safety, compliance, and user trust are paramount
Prior work building multi‑tenant or internal developer platforms that serve many product teams, including self‑service tooling, documentation, and migration strategies
Hands‑on work with Golang or similar languages used at Coinbase, and with modern cloud‑native stacks (container orchestration, service meshes, messaging systems, event‑driven architectures)
Benefits
Bonus eligibility
Equity eligibility
Benefits (including medical, dental, vision and 401(k))
Company
Coinbase
Coinbase is a crypto exchange and wallet platform that allows merchants and consumers to buy, sell, and store digital currencies.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Coinbase has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (181)
2024 (92)
2023 (96)
2022 (284)
2021 (183)
2020 (66)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$4.46BKey Investors
ARK Investment ManagementTiger Global ManagementIVP
2025-12-19Post Ipo Equity· $4.2M
2025-08-05Post Ipo Debt· $2.6B
2025-03-04Post Ipo Equity· $8M
Leadership Team
Brian Armstrong
CEO & Co-Founder
Alesia Haas
Chief Financial Officer
Recent News
2026-01-13
2026-01-13
2026-01-13
Company data provided by crunchbase