Senior Staff Software Engineer, Onboarding

Coinbase is on a mission to increase economic freedom in the world and is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to join their Identity team. This role involves owning the Onboarding & KYC platform, architecting the next generation platform, and driving reliability and customer experience improvements.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• Experience in Identity, Authentication/Authorization, Onboarding, KYC, Fraud/Risk, or Compliance platforms
• Interest in how AI will change identity/onboarding workflows; experience integrating AI into product/platform systems is a plus
• Background in fast-paced, high-growth internet/software environments