Staff Backend Software Engineer (Payments Platform)
Posted
Summary
Staff Backend Engineer on Coinbase's Payments team owning architecture for fiat on/off-ramp infrastructure processing billions in volume globally. Leads technical strategy, builds fault-tolerant distributed payment systems, drives reliability, and mentors engineers across the organization.
- 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, 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