Join Coinbase as a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Payments team in building scalable financial infrastructure.
Skills & Technologies
Role intensity
40% coding
AI in the day-to-day
Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs.
Requirements
- Experience
- 8+ years
Benefits
Joblaze summary
In this role, the Staff Software Engineer will lead the technical strategy and architecture for Coinbase's Payments platform, focusing on building and maintaining systems that handle high-volume transactions. Key skills include extensive experience with distributed systems, payment infrastructure, and a strong background in ensuring production reliability. This position is ideal for seasoned engineers with a proven track record in architecting scalable solutions and driving cross-team initiatives. Coinbase's fast-paced environment emphasizes collaboration and innovation, making it suitable for those eager to tackle complex challenges.
Joblaze insights
- Listed about a month ago on Joblaze — tracked directly from Coinbase's career page.
- Coinbase has 163 other open roles including Staff Applied Data Scientist, Pricing, Social Support Specialist III, Supervisor, Customer Success Team.
- 242 active distributed systems roles on Joblaze right now.
- 165 active APIs roles on Joblaze right now.
- 93 active Payments roles on Joblaze right now.
- Salary band is above the typical range for Backend roles (median ~$166,000).
- Pays more than 73% of the 149 salaried distributed systems roles we track (median $185,000).
Quick facts
- Is the Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Payments Platform role remote?
- It's hybrid — Coinbase expects some on-site time in Remote - USA.
- What's the salary range?
- Coinbase lists $218,025–$256,500 for this role.
- How much experience is required?
- At least 8 years of relevant experience for this Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Payments Platform 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: APIs, distributed systems, Payments.
- What seniority level is this role?
- Coinbase targets staff-level candidates for this position.
- Is this full-time or contract?
- Full-time for this Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Payments Platform 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.
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.
What you'll do:
- 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.
Required Skills and Experience:
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including hands-on experience building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional platforms.
- 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.
- History of influencing technical direction across teams and organizations without direct authority, including representing your area in org-level architecture and strategy forums.
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.
Job # P77339
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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