Senior Backend Engineer — Access & Authorization

Coinbase, Inc.; Indianapolis (IN); Hybrid; USD 186,000 - 219,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team. You will shape authentication and authorization across Coinbase’s distributed systems, balancing security with a simple user experience.

You will design and operate authentication capabilities, build high-throughput Go services, and mentor engineers while partnering across product, security, and infra teams. This role embraces a remote-first model with quarterly in-person surges.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend software engineering experience with Go or similar language.
• Experience designing secure APIs and handling authentication/authorization.
• Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores (Redis/DynamoDB).
• Strong collaboration across product, security, fraud, and infra teams.
• Responsible use of AI to improve workflows and quality.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end design and operation of authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, account recovery, and edge authorization.
• Build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services used across Coinbase products with strong observability and SLOs.
• Lead technical designs for tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth.
• Partner with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to balance conversion and protection against regulatory constraints.
• Build self-service tooling to enable teams to safely adopt access and authorization at scale.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through reviews, pairing, and on-call participation.

Skills

Go

OAuth 2.0/OpenID Connect

JWTs

2FA

Edge authorization

Observability/SLOs

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

gRPC

Protocol Buffers

Redis

DynamoDB

Job description

Coinbase is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team. You will shape authentication and authorization across Coinbase’s distributed systems, balancing security with a simple user experience.

You will design and operate authentication capabilities, build high-throughput Go services, and mentor engineers while partnering across product, security, and infra teams. This role embraces a remote-first model with quarterly in-person surges.