Coinbase is a company focused on increasing economic freedom globally through crypto and blockchain technology. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design and build the real-time risk infrastructure that protects payment flows, including fraud detection and transaction scoring across various payment methods.
Responsibilities:
- Own critical risk outcomes across CDP’s payment platform, including fraud loss, abuse prevention, and user friction — continuously optimizing the trade-off between risk and seamless customer experience
- Develop deep domain expertise in global payment systems and CDP products/APIs (onramps, offramps, transfers, payouts), helping shape a world-class crypto payment risk architecture as these platforms scale worldwide
- Design and build state-of-the-art risk decisioning systems, including core components such as policy/rule engines, machine learning models, real-time scoring services, and autonomous risk evaluation agents
- Architect and implement high-throughput data pipelines (batch, real-time, and streaming) that power risk detection, monitoring, experimentation, and model training at global scale
- Develop advanced detection capabilities spanning classical machine learning, graph-based methods, anomaly detection, and agentic AI systems to proactively identify and mitigate fraud and abuse
- Lead innovation at the intersection of risk, fraud, and agentic AI, conducting cutting-edge research and translating it into production systems
- Contribute to the broader technical community through publications, open research, or engineering blog posts, helping establish Coinbase as a leader in next-generation payment risk technology
Requirements:
- Minimum 3 years of software engineering experience
- Experience building real-time risk/fraud detection systems at scale
- Designing, building, and maintaining production services in a service-oriented architecture
- Experience with payment risk — chargebacks, unauthorized transactions, account takeover, payment fraud typologies
- Experience with rules engines and/or ML-based risk scoring (feature engineering, model serving, decisioning)
- Working with cross-border payment flows and the risk implications of multi-currency, multi-rail settlement
- Leadership skills to develop other engineers and influence risk strategy
- Demonstrates the ability to responsibly use generative AI tools and copilots (e.g., LibreChat, Gemini, Glean) in daily workflows, continuously learn as tools evolve, and apply human‑in‑the‑loop practices to deliver business‑ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in efficiency, cost, and quality
- Experience in rapid company growth (from startup to mid-size)
- Experience at a fintech or neobank scaling risk systems from early stage to high volume
- Proficiency with Golang, Python, Kafka, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis
- Experience with event-driven architectures for real-time streaming risk evaluation
- Blockchain/onchain analytics tools (Chainalysis, TRM Labs, Elliptic)
- Experience decomposing monolithic risk systems into microservices
- Crypto-forward experience, including familiarity with onchain activity, DeFi protocols, and cross-chain transfers