Senior Staff Engineer — Secure Access & Authorization

Coinbase, Inc.; Pierre (SD); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase, Inc. seeks a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team. You will shape authentication and authorization capabilities powering Coinbase products and partner integrations, balancing strong security with a simple user experience.

You will build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services across web, mobile, API, and partner experiences, with observability and SLOs, while mentoring engineers and collaborating across product, security, fraud, and infra teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend software engineering with strong Go or equivalent systems language.
• Experience designing secure APIs and handling authentication/authorization, session management, tokens.
• Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores like Redis or DynamoDB.
• Strong communication across teams and cross-functional delivery.
• Responsible use of generative AI with human oversight.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, and edge authorization.
• Build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services across Coinbase products and partners.
• Lead technical designs for signed tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth.
• Collaborate with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to balance conversion and protection.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through design reviews and on-call participation.

Skills

Go

OAuth 2.0

OpenID Connect

JWTs

Security

Distributed systems

gRPC

Protocol Buffers

Redis

DynamoDB

Tools

gRPC

Protocol Buffers

Redis

DynamoDB

Job description

Coinbase, Inc. seeks a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team. You will shape authentication and authorization capabilities powering Coinbase products and partner integrations, balancing strong security with a simple user experience.

You will build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services across web, mobile, API, and partner experiences, with observability and SLOs, while mentoring engineers and collaborating across product, security, fraud, and infra teams.