Senior Backend Engineer, Risk — Real-Time Fraud

Coinbase, Inc.; Dover (DE); Hybrid; USD 167,000 - 205,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Risk Engineering team within the Consumer & Business group. You will build and optimize the systems that detect and prevent fraud, manage risk in real time, and protect millions of users at crypto-market scale.

You will mentor engineers, drive architectural decisions, and collaborate with Data Science, ML, Risk Analysts, Product, and Compliance to deliver end-to-end features with strong reliability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend software engineering experience delivering complex systems in production.
• Proficiency in Go, Ruby, Python, or Java with distributed systems design experience.
• Ability to translate ambiguous requirements into clear technical plans across teams.
• History of leading end-to-end projects including scoping, design, and mentoring.
• Experience leading incident response, post-mortems, and improving high-availability systems.
• Uses generative AI responsibly with human oversight to improve workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of complex risk platform features end-to-end, from architecture through implementation, deployment, and monitoring, with stringent requirements for correctness, performance, and reliability
• Drive architectural decisions that shape Coinbase's risk detection and mitigation systems, translating ambiguous business requirements into scalable working architectures that balance fraud prevention with user experience
• Partner cross-functionally with Data Science, ML, Risk Analysts, Product, and Compliance teams to build proactive systems (real-time decisioning engines, model-driven fraud detection) and reactive solutions (incident response tooling, compliance-driven risk controls)
• Build AI-native risk systems that leverage fleets of agents to automate complex detection and response workflows, significantly reducing the need for manual intervention
• Strengthen the team by mentoring engineers, conducting rigorous code reviews, writing technical design documents for complex systems, and championing engineering best practices across the codebase
• Own system quality and operational excellence by proactively addressing technical debt, driving bug triaging, and leading incident response and post-mortems to ensure platform reliability

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems

APIs (REST/GraphQL)

Mentoring engineers

Incident response leadership

Generative AI usage

Tools

Go

Ruby

Python

Java

Job description

Coinbase is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Risk Engineering team within the Consumer & Business group. You will build and optimize the systems that detect and prevent fraud, manage risk in real time, and protect millions of users at crypto-market scale.

You will mentor engineers, drive architectural decisions, and collaborate with Data Science, ML, Risk Analysts, Product, and Compliance to deliver end-to-end features with strong reliability.