Senior Backend Engineer, Access & Authorization

Coinbase, Inc.; Washington (District of Columbia); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Bonus eligibility

Medical, dental, vision, 401(k)

Job summary

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team.

You’ll design authentication and authorization capabilities, build high-throughput Go/gRPC services, and drive secure, scalable access across Coinbase products and partner integrations. You will mentor engineers, lead complex initiatives like signed tokens and device-aware authentication, and collaborate with product, security, and infra teams to balance conversion with protection.

Qualifications

• 8+ years backend software engineering with Go or similar.
• Design secure APIs with authentication, authorization, and token handling.
• Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, Redis or DynamoDB.
• Experience delivering cross-functional projects and strong communication.
• Responsible use of generative AI with human oversight.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end design and operation of authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, and edge authorization.
• Build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services across Coinbase products with observability and SLOs.
• Lead designs for signed tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth.
• Partner with product, security, fraud, and infra teams to balance needs and constraints.
• Simplify integration patterns and build self-service tooling for safe adoption at scale.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing, code reviews, and on-call participation.

Skills

Go

OAuth 2.0

OpenID Connect

gRPC

Distributed systems

JWTs

Protocol Buffers

Redis

DynamoDB

Tools

Redis

DynamoDB

Protocol Buffers

Job description

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team.

You’ll design authentication and authorization capabilities, build high-throughput Go/gRPC services, and drive secure, scalable access across Coinbase products and partner integrations. You will mentor engineers, lead complex initiatives like signed tokens and device-aware authentication, and collaborate with product, security, and infra teams to balance conversion with protection.