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Lead technical strategy and architecture for Coinbase Payments, building high-availability, low-latency payment rails and funds-flow systems. Drive cross-team initiatives, enforce financial correctness (idempotency, reconciliation, auditability), improve reliability and cost efficiency using observability data, mentor senior engineers, and align stakeholders across product, risk, and compliance to deliver scalable global payment solutions.
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 Payments Platform team within the Platform group, you'll define the engineering vision for how fiat moves into and out of Coinbase across 50+ countries and payment rails. Payments Platform is the bridge between the traditional financial world and the crypto economy, building the on- and off-ramps that power reliable, seamless payment processing at global scale. You'll shape architectural cohesion across rails, orchestration, and funds-flow systems while driving platform-level reliability, cost efficiency, and readiness for significant volume growth.
What you'll do:
- Own the multi-quarter technical strategy for Payments spanning rails integrations, orchestration, routing, and funds-flow services to support new products, geographies, and significant growth in payment volume.
- Architect the core Payments platform for high availability, low latency, and cost efficiency at global scale, enforcing technical standards for financial correctness including idempotency, reconciliation, failure-mode handling, and auditability across all money-movement paths.
- Lead end-to-end design and rollout of large cross-team initiatives (e.g., new global rails, platform decompositions, resiliency programs), breaking high ambiguity into clear milestones and measurable outcomes.
- Partner with FinHub, Payments Risk, Regulatory Platform, and Product to design cohesive architectures that balance customer experience, risk controls, compliance, and unit economics.
- Drive systematic reliability and efficiency improvements using observability signals (success rates, latency, cost, incident patterns) to identify and resolve structural platform gaps.
- Represent Payments in executive and cross-org forums, communicating tradeoffs clearly, aligning stakeholders on strategy, and mentoring senior/staff engineers across pods on system design quality and long-term maintainability.
Required Skills and Experience:
- 12+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production, with deep money-movement architecture experience (PSPs, ISO 20022, routing, double-entry, high-volume payment systems).
- Deep expertise in backend programming (e.g., Go, Python, Java) and cloud-native architecture, with a proven track record designing highly available, high-performance financial systems.
- Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional technical initiatives spanning multiple teams, anticipate scaling bottlenecks proactively, and drive systematic platform improvements.
- Experience with ledgering, reconciliation, or settlement systems at scale, with strong financial acumen for handling accounting data and transactions with high precision.
- Proven ability to distill complex technical concepts into clear, actionable solutions for both engineering and executive audiences.
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.
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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)).
Annual base salary range (excluding equity and bonus):
$253,895—$298,700 USD
- 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.
- US Applicants: View Employee Rights, Know Your Rights, and E-Verify Notice of Participation.
- Accommodations: If you are an individual with a disability who needs a reasonable accommodation, email us your request and contact info at accommodations[at]coinbase.com. Need screen reading technology? Click here to download a free compatible screen reader and view the tutorial.
- Data Privacy & Arbitration: By submitting your application, you agree to our Candidate Privacy Notice. US applicants: By submitting your application, you agree to Arbitration of Disputes.
- AI Disclosure: Coinbase is piloting an AI tool based on machine learning technologies to conduct initial screening interviews to qualified applicants. The tool simulates realistic interview scenarios and engages in dynamic conversation. Coinbase is also piloting an AI interview intelligence platform to transcribe and summarize interview notes, allowing our interviewers to fully focus on you as the candidate. Coinbase will not use AI to make decisions impacting employment.
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