Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Platform (Payment Rails)

Coinbase is on a mission to increase economic freedom globally and is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend to join their Payment Rails team. In this role, you will own the technical strategy and architecture for payment infrastructure, ensuring high reliability and compliance while driving innovative solutions in a fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities:

• Own the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for Payment Rails—designing APIs, orchestration layers, and integrations that consolidate fragmented payment flows into a cohesive, multi-tenant platform other teams can build on
• Build and scale complex distributed systems that process high-volume, high-reliability payment traffic—designing for fault isolation, graceful degradation, strong observability, and clear SLOs for Tier-0/Tier-1 services
• Drive an AI-first approach to engineering workflows—identify where AI-powered tools can accelerate development, improve code quality, and enhance operational efficiency across the team and broader engineering org
• 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 requirements
• Lead high-stakes scaling initiatives and define the technical direction for how Coinbase moves money—anticipating bottlenecks before they occur and driving proactive, systematic improvements
• Raise the engineering bar across Payment Rails and adjacent orgs by establishing paved roads, design patterns, and best practices that elevate team technical quality through mentorship, design reviews, and process improvements
• Mentor and train other team members on design techniques and coding standards

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering
• Experience building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional systems
• You've designed and built fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems at scale—with a demonstrable track record of architecting systems that handle billions of dollars in transaction volume
• Platform-builder mindset: you've led efforts to turn fragmented services and bespoke integrations into coherent, reusable platforms (e.g., shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi-tenant architectures)
• Strong operational excellence: experience owning production reliability, leading high-severity incident response, and driving systemic improvements from postmortems across multiple teams or domains
• Collaborative leadership: history of influencing across teams and organizations without direct authority, driving consensus on high-impact technical decisions, and representing your area in org-level forums
• 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 with payment processors, banking integrations, or payment gateways (e.g., Stripe, Plaid, SWIFT, ACH, SEPA, card networks)
• Background in crypto or blockchain technologies, including familiarity with stablecoin transfers, on-chain settlements, or cross-chain payment flows
• Experience working in highly regulated industries where safety, compliance, and user trust are paramount—particularly in fintech or financial services