Senior Staff Software Engineer, Onboarding

Role Overview

• Own the Onboarding & KYC platform end-to-end: Serve as the primary technical owner for the domain, including how onboarding and identity signals integrate with adjacent products, services, and data platforms across Coinbase.
• Architect the next generation platform: Lead a multi-quarter rebuild modernizing legacy systems into a geo-specific architecture that scales globally and supports evolving compliance requirements.
• Set the technical vision and standards: Act as the technical authority for this area, driving domain abstraction, defining the target architecture, and expanding the platform beyond KYC into a broader onboarding foundation that can support new product offerings and use cases.
• Drive reliability and zero-downtime evolution: Design for high availability, operational integrity, and safe migrations—ensuring critical identity flows remain resilient while systems are modernized.
• Improve customer experience through platform design: Reduce onboarding friction while maintaining strong compliance controls, optimizing for conversion, correctness, and consistency across regions.
• Innovate beyond today’s roadmap: Explore and prototype future-forward directions such as Agentic Onboarding (AI-driven) and On-Chain KYC, including how emerging AI capabilities should reshape identity systems and what an “AI-proof” identity platform looks like.
• Cultural and technical leadership: Mentor Staff engineers, raise the bar on engineering and operational excellence, and introduce new technical paradigms and best practices.
• Influence cross-functionally: Partner with Product, Design, Compliance, Legal, and other engineering orgs to align on requirements, tradeoffs, and sequencing for complex, high-stakes initiatives.

Requirements

• 12+ years of backend engineering experience, with a track record of technical leadership on mission-critical platforms
• Strong system design and coding ability; proven experience operating high-availability, high-correctness services
• Demonstrated success migrating legacy systems to modern architectures with minimal/zero downtime
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, service boundaries, reliability, observability, and operational rigor
• Strong written and verbal communication; able to drive alignment across senior stakeholders
• Comfort leading large, ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives and owning outcomes end-to-end
• Experience mentoring and leveling up senior engineers through direct, actionable feedback.

Tech Stack

• Distributed Systems

Benefits

• Full time offers from Coinbase also include bonus eligibility + equity eligibility + benefits (including medical, dental, vision and 401(k)).