Lead the engineering vision for Payments at Coinbase, shaping the future of finance with a focus on reliability and efficiency.
Skills & Technologies
Role intensity
40% coding
AI in the day-to-day
Coinbase is piloting an AI tool for initial screening interviews and an AI platform for interview note summarization.
Requirements
- Experience
- 10+ years
Benefits
Joblaze summary
In this role, the Senior Staff Software Engineer for Payments at Coinbase will focus on defining and executing the technical strategy for the Payments platform, ensuring high availability and efficiency in money movement. The position requires extensive experience with large-scale distributed systems, backend programming in languages like Python or Go, and a strong understanding of payment architectures. This role is ideal for seasoned engineers with a background in financial systems who are adept at leading cross-functional initiatives and mentoring others. Coinbase emphasizes a collaborative environment, with opportunities for in-person teamwork during quarterly sessions.
Joblaze insights
- Listed 14 days ago on Joblaze — tracked directly from Coinbase's career page.
- Coinbase has 163 other open roles including Strategic Program Lead, Supervisor, Customer Success Team, Staff Applied Data Scientist, Pricing.
- 2585 active Python roles on Joblaze right now.
- 913 active Go roles on Joblaze right now.
- 885 active Java roles on Joblaze right now.
- Salary band is above the typical range for Backend roles (median ~$166,000).
- Pays more than 91% of the 1513 salaried Python roles we track (median $160,000).
Quick facts
- Is the Senior Staff Software Engineer, Payments role remote?
- It's hybrid — Coinbase expects some on-site time in Remote - USA.
- What's the salary range?
- Coinbase lists $253,895–$298,700 for this role.
- How much experience is required?
- At least 10 years of relevant experience for this Senior Staff Software Engineer, Payments role.
- Where is the role based?
- Coinbase is hiring for this position in Remote - USA.
- What's the tech stack?
- Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: Java, Go, distributed systems, ISO 20022, Python, cloud-native architecture.
- What seniority level is this role?
- Coinbase targets staff-level candidates for this position.
- Is this full-time or contract?
- Full-time for this Senior Staff Software Engineer, Payments role at Coinbase.
From the original posting
Ready to do the most impactful work of your career? At Coinbase, we are uncompromising on our mission to increase economic freedom. The bar is high, the environment is intense, and we like it that way. This isn't a place for complacency, it’s a place to be pushed past your perceived limits. If you're ready to build the future of finance alongside people who refuse to settle for "good enough," you belong here. Coinbase is a remote-first, but not remote-only company. Expect to get together quarterly for intense in-person working sessions called “surges.” learn more about working at Coinbase.
As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Platform Payments team, you'll define the engineering vision for how fiat moves into and out of Coinbase across 50+ countries and payment rails. This team builds and operates the fiat on- and off-ramps, routing, orchestration, and funds-flow services that power every customer-facing payment experience. You'll own the multi-quarter technical strategy, architect for global scale and reliability, and drive platform-level improvements that directly impact payment success rates, latency, and cost efficiency.
What you'll do:
- Define and drive the multi-quarter technical strategy for Payments spanning rails, orchestration, and transfers to support new products, geos, and significant growth in payment volume.
- Architect and evolve the core Payments platform (rails integrations, routing, and funds-flow services) for high availability, low latency, and cost efficiency at global scale.
- Lead end-to-end design and rollout of large, cross-team initiatives (e.g., new global rails, decomp/migrations, resiliency programs), breaking ambiguity into clear milestones and measurable outcomes.
- Set and enforce technical standards for financial correctness across Payments, including idempotency, reconciliation, failure-mode handling, and auditability for all money-movement paths.
- Partner with FinHub, Payments Risk, Regulatory Platform, and Product to design cohesive architectures that balance customer experience, risk controls, compliance, and unit economics.
- Provide deep technical mentorship to senior and staff engineers across Payments pods, upleveling system design quality, review rigor, and long-term maintainability.
Required Skills and Experience:
- 10+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production, with deep expertise in backend programming (e.g., Go, Java, Python) and cloud-native architecture.
- Deep money-movement architecture experience including PSPs, ISO 20022, routing, double-entry ledgering, and high-volume payment systems.
- Proven track record designing highly available, high-performance systems with the ability to anticipate scaling bottlenecks and address them proactively.
- Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives across multiple engineering teams and mentoring senior engineers in system design and long-term maintainability.
- Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical tradeoffs clearly to executive and cross-org stakeholders and secure alignment on high-impact technical decisions.
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.
Job ID: P77633
Pay Transparency Notice: Base salary varies by location (see range below). Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)).
- Application Limit: Candidates may submit a maximum of 3 applications within a 6-month period.
- Equal Opportunity Employer: Coinbase is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or genetic information. Applicants with criminal histories will be considered consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws.
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