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 Staff Software Engineer on the Access & Authorization team within the Platform group, you'll help shape the systems customers use to securely access Coinbase. This team builds and operates distributed services at the intersection of security, identity, developer infrastructure, and customer experience. You'll design foundational authentication and authorization capabilities that balance strong security with a simple experience, creating leverage across every Coinbase product and partner integration.
What you'll do:
- Own end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of capabilities across authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, account recovery, and edge authorization.
- Build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services used across Coinbase's web, mobile, API, and partner experiences, with strong observability, failure testing, and measurable SLOs.
- Lead technical designs for complex initiatives such as signed authorization tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth.
- Partner with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to balance customer conversion, account protection, regulatory requirements, and engineering constraints.
- Simplify integration patterns and build self-service tooling that enables product teams to adopt access and authorization capabilities safely at scale.
- Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through design reviews, pairing, code reviews, and on-call participation.
Required Skills and Experience:
- 8+ years of backend software engineering experience with strong proficiency in Go or a comparable systems-oriented language, including building and operating reliable, high-throughput distributed services in production.
- Demonstrated experience designing secure APIs and reasoning about authentication, authorization, session management, trust boundaries, and token handling (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE, or related standards).
- Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores such as Redis or DynamoDB, with strong operational instincts using metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and SLOs to run critical services.
- Track record of delivering complex, cross-functional projects from technical design through production rollout, with clear written and verbal communication that aligns engineering, security, product, and infrastructure partners.
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.
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.
Skills Required
- 8+ years backend software engineering experience with strong proficiency in Go or comparable systems-oriented language
- Experience building and operating reliable, high-throughput distributed services in production
- Designing secure APIs and reasoning about authentication, authorization, session management, trust boundaries, and token handling (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE)
- Proficiency with gRPC and Protocol Buffers
- Experience with data stores such as Redis or DynamoDB and strong operational instincts
- Experience using metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and SLOs to run critical services
- Track record delivering complex, cross-functional projects from design through production rollout with strong written and verbal communication
- Responsible use of generative AI with human oversight to produce business-ready outputs
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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