Staff Software Engineer (Platform - Identity)

Coinbase is on a mission to increase economic freedom in the world and is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Identity Accounts team, which is crucial for user authentication and account management. The role involves driving roadmap execution across sub-teams, ensuring operational excellence, and collaborating with internal partners to deliver scalable solutions.

Responsibilities:

• Drive roadmap execution across three focused sub-teams: Foundations (authorization infrastructure), Users Platformization (decomposing the legacy monolith), and Settings & Account Management (Security Settings 2.0, account navigation redesign)
• Own reliability and operational excellence for 8+ mission-critical Tier-0/Tier-1 services — maintaining 99.99% uptime, championing engineering quality, and acting as quarterback during high-severity incidents
• Represent the team to internal product groups and key partners in Security, Risk, Compliance, and Design — building alignment and ensuring seamless integration support
• Partner with Product and your EM to define strategic roadmaps, prioritize initiatives, and translate complex constraints into simple, scalable platform solutions
• Champion engineering excellence — drive code and design reviews, set engineering standards, and build every capability to be composable and reusable across product lines (no bespoke, one-off integrations)
• Accelerate internal customers by reducing new product team onboarding time to under 2 weeks and delivering excellent APIs, clear documentation, and strong integration support

Requirements:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience
• Demonstrated track record of architecting and delivering systems at scale — high-throughput, high-availability services serving millions of requests in production
• Proven experience leading AI/LLM product development — building AI agents, code generation systems, or developer-facing AI tooling in production environments
• Strong command of Go, gRPC, Kubernetes, and service mesh architectures
• Ability to drive technical clarity in ambiguous, high-stakes situations — you can take a vague problem ('compliance teams can't self-serve'), define the right solution space, and execute it to completion
• A history of influencing across organizational boundaries — getting buy-in from skeptical stakeholders, aligning competing priorities, and building durable cross-team partnerships
• Excellent written and verbal communication — you produce technical design documents that build organizational confidence and create shared understanding
• Based in or able to commute to NYC or SF, with willingness to work from the tech hub once or twice a week or on an as-needed basis for architecture reviews, stakeholder meetings, and team offsites
• Experience in identity, authentication, authorization, or account management systems
• Prior experience leading a Platform team or similar domain with high internal customer dependency
• Familiarity with our stack: Go, gRPC, React, SpiceDB, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Datadog
• Background building financial, high-reliability, or security systems