Senior Backend Engineer, Secure Access & Authorization

Coinbase, Inc.; Boston (MA); 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, authorization, and edge security across Coinbase products and partner integrations.

You will build secure, low-latency Go services, own designs for tokens, 2FA, and session management, and mentor engineers while partnering with product, security, and infrastructure teams to balance customer needs and security.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend software engineering experience with Go or a comparable systems-oriented language.
• Experience designing secure APIs and reasoning about authentication, authorization, session management, trust boundaries, and token handling (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE).
• Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores like Redis or DynamoDB, with observability via metrics/logs/traces/alerts/SLOs.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of 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 observability and SLOs.
• Lead technical designs for initiatives such as signed tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth.
• Partner with product, security, fraud, and infra teams to balance conversion, protection, and regulatory requirements.
• Simplify integration patterns and build self-service tooling for scalable access and authorization capabilities.
• Mentor engineers through reviews, pairing, and on-call participation.

Skills

Go

Distributed systems

APIs

OAuth/OpenID/JWT

gRPC/Protobufs

Security considerations

Tools

Redis

DynamoDB

Protocol Buffers

gRPC

Job description

Coinbase is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team. You will shape authentication, authorization, and edge security across Coinbase products and partner integrations.

You will build secure, low-latency Go services, own designs for tokens, 2FA, and session management, and mentor engineers while partnering with product, security, and infrastructure teams to balance customer needs and security.