Senior Backend Engineer — Secure Access & Auth

Coinbase, Inc.; Hartford (CT); On-site; USD 186,000 - 219,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team to design and operate authentication and authorization capabilities that power Coinbase products and partner integrations.

You will build secure, low-latency Go services with strong observability, lead designs for tokens and passkeys, and collaborate with product, security, and infra teams to balance user experience and compliance. This role emphasizes scalable self-service tooling and mentoring.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend software engineering experience with strong proficiency in Go or a comparable systems-oriented language.
• Demonstrated experience designing secure APIs and reasoning about authentication, authorization, session management, trust boundaries, and token handling (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE, or related standards).
• Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores such as Redis or DynamoDB, with strong operational instincts using metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and SLOs to run critical services.
• Track record of delivering complex, cross-functional projects from technical design through production rollout, with clear written and verbal communication that aligns engineering, security, product, and infrastructure partners.
• Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of capabilities across authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, account recovery, and edge authorization.
• Build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services used across Coinbase's web, mobile, API, and partner experiences, with strong observability, failure testing, and measurable SLOs.
• Lead technical designs for complex initiatives such as signed authorization tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth.
• Partner with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to balance customer conversion, account protection, regulatory requirements, and engineering constraints.
• Simplify integration patterns and build self-service tooling that enables product teams to adopt access and authorization capabilities safely at scale.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through design reviews, pairing, code reviews, and on-call participation.

Skills

Go

OAuth 2.0

OpenID Connect

JWTs

gRPC

Distributed systems

Backend development

Tools

Redis

DynamoDB

Protocol Buffers

Job description

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team to design and operate authentication and authorization capabilities that power Coinbase products and partner integrations.

You will build secure, low-latency Go services with strong observability, lead designs for tokens and passkeys, and collaborate with product, security, and infra teams to balance user experience and compliance. This role emphasizes scalable self-service tooling and mentoring.