Senior Staff Software Engineer, Payments

Posted Yesterday
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Hiring Remotely in Canada
Remote
254K-299K Annually
Senior level
Artificial Intelligence • Blockchain • Fintech • Financial Services • Cryptocurrency • NFT • Web3
Coinbase is on a mission to increase economic freedom for more than 1 billion people.
The Role
Lead technical strategy and architecture for Coinbase Payments: design and evolve high‑availability, low‑latency funds‑flow and rails systems, drive cross‑team initiatives and reliability improvements, enforce financial correctness, mentor senior engineers, and align stakeholders across product, risk, and compliance.
Summary Generated by Built In

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.

Payments Platform is at the front door of Coinbase’s financial ecosystem. Our mission is to move old money into crypto and power financial access and payments for the crypto economy globally. As the bridge between the traditional financial world and the crypto economy, we build and operate the fiat on- and off-ramps and payment services that let Coinbase’s customer-facing products deliver reliable, seamless payment processing and connect customer fiat funds into crypto.

We’re seeking a deep technical leader to define the engineering vision for Payments, shape architectural cohesion across our global payment rails and funds-flow systems, drive platform-level reliability and cost efficiency, and lead the next evolution of how fiat moves into and out of Coinbase.

What you’ll be doing (ie. job duties):

  • 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 high 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 closely 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/staff engineers across Payments pods, upleveling system design quality, review rigor, and long‑term maintainability.
  • Use data and observability signals (e.g., success rates, latency, cost, incident patterns) to identify structural platform gaps and lead systematic reliability and efficiency improvements.
  • Represent Payments in executive and cross‑org forums, clearly communicating tradeoffs, aligning stakeholders on strategy, and securing buy‑in for high‑impact technical bets.

What we look for in you (ie. job requirements): 

  • 10+ years building and operating large‑scale distributed systems in production.
  • Deep money‑movement architecture experience (PSPs, ISO 20022, routing, double‑entry, high‑volume payment systems)
  • Deep expertise in backend programming (e.g., Python, Go, Java) and cloud‑native architecture.
  • Proven track record designing highly available, high‑performance systems.
  • Ability to anticipate scaling bottlenecks before they occur and take decisive, proactive measures.
  • Experience leading cross‑functional technical initiatives and mentoring senior engineers.
  • Commitment to technical excellence, sharing best practices, and fostering a strong engineering culture.
  • Ability to distill complex technical concepts into clear and actionable solutions.

Nice to haves:

  • Experience designing and operating ledgering or trading systems at large scale.
  • Strong financial acumen with experience handling accounting data and financial transactions with high precision and reliability.
  • Experience collaborating closely with finance and accounting teams.

Job ID: P77633

Pay Transparency Notice: The target annual base salary for this position can range as detailed below. Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility and benefits (including medical, dental, and vision).

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.

Skills Required

  • 10+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
  • Deep money-movement architecture experience (PSPs, ISO 20022, routing, double-entry, high-volume payment systems).
  • Deep expertise in backend programming (e.g., Python, Go, Java) and cloud-native architecture.
  • Proven track record designing highly available, high-performance systems.
  • Ability to anticipate scaling bottlenecks and take proactive measures.
  • Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives and mentoring senior engineers.
  • Commitment to technical excellence, sharing best practices, and fostering strong engineering culture.
  • Ability to distill complex technical concepts into clear, actionable solutions.
  • Experience designing and operating ledgering or trading systems at large scale.
  • Strong financial acumen with experience handling accounting data and financial transactions with high precision and reliability.
  • Experience collaborating closely with finance and accounting teams.

What the Team is Saying

Jona Frank
Wes Janisen
Sofia Sieminski
Philip Temitayo
Varsha Mahadevan

Coinbase Compensation & Benefits Highlights

How does Coinbase ensure its pay and bonus plans are competitive?

Coinbase uses a market-driven, pay-for-performance approach to keep pay and bonus plans competitive. Coinbase regularly benchmarks roles against leading technology and fintech companies using external market data and reviews its compensation programs on a recurring basis to ensure salary, bonus, and equity remain aligned with the broader market and business goals. Annual bonus and equity programs are tied to both company results and individual impact, so when Coinbase and its people perform, total rewards reflect that performance.

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The Company
4,700 Employees
Year Founded: 2012

What We Do

Crypto creates economic freedom by ensuring that people can participate fairly in the economy, and Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) is on a mission to increase economic freedom for more than 1 billion people. We’re updating the century-old financial system by providing a trusted platform that makes it easy for people and institutions to engage with crypto assets, including trading, staking, safekeeping, spending, and fast, free global transfers. We also provide critical infrastructure for onchain activity and support builders who share our vision that onchain is the new online. And together with the crypto community, we advocate for responsible rules to make the benefits of crypto available around the world.

Why Work With Us

We have the opportunity to accelerate the pace of innovation in the world by building an open financial system. Our vision is to create more economic freedom in the world, to help people control their own wealth, start companies, have financial privacy, and participate in the global economy. And to get us there, we focus, build and move as a team.

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Employees work remotely.

Coinbase is remote-first, which enables us to innovate, build and move quickly. Our teams are able to work effectively from around the globe with time for in-person offsites and team meetups to enhance collaboration and connection.

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