Senior Staff Software Engineer, Platform - IAM

Coinbase is a company focused on increasing economic freedom through the future of finance. The Senior Staff Software Engineer will own the technical strategy and architecture for Identity & Access Management across human, AI agent, service, and workload identities, driving adoption across hundreds of engineering teams. The role also partners with security and business stakeholders to automate compliance controls and mentors senior technical talent.

Responsibilities:

• Own the multi-year technical strategy for IAM end to end, including the architecture that unifies workforce, AI agent, and service/workload identity under a common model with shared primitives for authentication, authorization, provisioning, and governance
• Drive architecture decisions across multiple pods and teams you don't manage - establishing the standards, review bars, and integration contracts the rest of engineering builds against
• Build the adoption strategy for 700+ systems, including sequencing, migration paths, and build-vs-buy decisions that determine what we own versus integrate
• Partner with Security, Compliance, IT, Infrastructure, and product engineering leadership to translate audit and regulatory requirements (UAR, SOX, SOC 2) into automated controls and self-generating evidence
• Lead the data model and tooling that answer "who has access to what, and why" across a heterogeneous estate, reducing standing privilege while making the secure path the fast path
• Grow the technical bench by mentoring staff and senior engineers and raising the org's depth in identity as a domain

Requirements:

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including a track record as the most senior technical leader on a platform spanning multiple teams with multi-year architecture driven to adoption across dozens of consuming teams
• Deep IAM expertise across more than one domain (workforce identity, authorization, access lifecycle, or non-human identity) with substantive experience in service or workload identity - service-to-service auth, workload identity federation, or machine credential management at scale
• Production Go experience and distributed systems design on AWS, with fluency in identity protocols and standards (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, and workload identity patterns)
• Proven influence without authority at senior levels - you've changed the technical direction of teams and orgs outside your own and secured leadership alignment on ambiguous, org-wide access-risk problems
• Ability to translate audit and regulatory requirements into automated technical controls, with clear written and verbal communication that frames complex identity problems for executive audiences
• Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality