Remote-First Staff Backend Architect, Payments Platform

Coinbase, Inc.; Atlanta (GA); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase, Inc. is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for the Payments team within the Platform organization.

You will own the architecture and technical direction of these systems to ensure reliability, scalability, and correctness as Coinbase expands into new regions and payment methods. You will design a multi-year strategy, build distributed systems with clear SLOs, mentor engineers, and collaborate with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate business needs into robust technical

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including hands-on building payment systems.
• Experience architecting fault-tolerant distributed systems at scale with billions in volume.
• Experience owning production reliability and incident response across multiple teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for the Payments platform, defining the roadmap for scaling integrations, routing, and funds-flow systems across global markets.
• Build and evolve distributed systems that process high-volume payment traffic, designing for fault isolation, graceful degradation, observability, and clear SLOs for Tier-0/Tier-1 services.
• Drive engineering quality by establishing paved roads, shared frameworks, and coding standards that elevate the technical bar across the Payments team and adjacent orgs.
• 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 needs.
• Lead high-stakes scaling and reliability initiatives, anticipating bottlenecks before they occur and driving systematic improvements from incident postmortems.
• Strengthen team capabilities through hands-on mentorship, design reviews, and architectural guidance that accelerate the growth of engineers across the team.

Skills

8+ years exp

Distributed systems

Payments experience

Incident response

AI governance

Job description

Coinbase, Inc. is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for the Payments team within the Platform organization.

You will own the architecture and technical direction of these systems to ensure reliability, scalability, and correctness as Coinbase expands into new regions and payment methods. You will design a multi-year strategy, build distributed systems with clear SLOs, mentor engineers, and collaborate with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate business needs into robust technical