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
Please be advised that each candidate may submit a maximum of four applications within any 30-day period. We encourage you to carefully evaluate how your skills and interests align with Coinbase's roles before applying.
Commitment to Equal OpportunityCoinbase is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation or any other basis protected by applicable law. Coinbase will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. For US applicants, you may view the Employee Rights and the Know Your Rights notices by clicking on their corresponding links. Additionally, Coinbase participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law.
Coinbase is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation because of a disability for any part of the employment process, please contact us at accommodations[at]coinbase.com to let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. For quick access to screen reading technology compatible with this site click here to download a free compatible screen reader (free step by step tutorial can be found here).
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AI DisclosureFor select roles, 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. A human recruiter will review your interview responses, provided in the form of a voice recording and/or transcript, to assess them against the qualifications and characteristics outlined in the job description.
For select roles, 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.
The above pilots are for testing purposes and Coinbase will not use AI to make decisions impacting employment. To request a reasonable accommodation due to disability, please contact accommodations[at]coinbase.com
Skills Required
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, including hands-on building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional platforms.
- Proven track record architecting and delivering fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems at scale.
- Experience processing high transaction volumes (billions of dollars) and designing for fault isolation and graceful degradation.
- Led platform-building efforts (shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi-tenant architectures) to create reusable systems.
- Owned production reliability, led high-severity incident response, and driven systemic improvements across teams.
- History of influencing technical direction across teams and representing architecture/strategy at org level.
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly with human oversight to produce business-ready outputs and workflow improvements.
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.
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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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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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