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 Payment Rails team within the Platform organization. Payment Rails powers fiat on- and off-ramps for individual and institutional customers, moving hundreds of billions of dollars in transaction volume each year. You'll shape the architecture of this network, designing and scaling systems that ensure every payment is reliable, efficient, and correct.
What you'll do:
- Own the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for scaling Payment Rails' partner integrations and routing across markets and payment options.
- Build 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 an AI-first approach to engineering workflows, identifying where AI-powered tools can accelerate development, improve code quality, and enhance operational efficiency.
- Partner with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate ambiguous business requirements into technical solutions that balance speed, safety, and regulatory needs.
- Lead high-stakes scaling initiatives, anticipating bottlenecks before they occur and driving systematic improvements to how Coinbase moves money.
- Strengthen the engineering bar by establishing paved roads, design patterns, and best practices, and by mentoring engineers through design reviews and coding standards.
Required Skills and Experience:
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional systems.
- Demonstrated track record of architecting fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems that handle billions of dollars in transaction volume.
- Led efforts to turn fragmented services into coherent, reusable platforms (e.g., shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi-tenant architectures).
- Proven ownership of production reliability, including leading high-severity incident response and driving systemic improvements from postmortems.
- History of influencing across teams without direct authority, driving consensus on high-impact technical decisions, and representing your area in org-level forums.
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.
Job #: P76350
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.
- 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
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering
- Experience building payment systems or high-volume transactional systems
- Track record of architecting highly reliable distributed systems
- Experience owning production reliability
- History of influencing across teams
- Ability to use generative AI tools in workflows
What the Team is Saying
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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.
Coinbase Insights
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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