Staff Backend Architect – Payments Platform, Scale & Reliability

Coinbase, Inc.; Trenton (NJ); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Payments team within the Platform organization.

You will own the architecture and technical direction of the payments infrastructure powering fiat on- and off-ramps, serving individual and institutional customers worldwide. You will define the multi-year technical strategy, drive scalable, fault-tolerant systems, and collaborate with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to meet regulatory needs.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including payments or financial platforms.
• Experience architecting fault-tolerant, scalable distributed systems at scale.
• Led platform-building efforts transforming fragmented services into coherent, reusable systems.
• Proven production reliability ownership and incident response experience.
• Ability to influence technical direction without direct authority.
• Responsible use of generative AI with human oversight.

Responsibilities

• Own multi-year technical strategy and architecture for the Payments platform, roadmapping scaling across global markets.
• Build and evolve distributed systems processing high-volume payment traffic with fault isolation and observability.
• Drive engineering quality by establishing shared frameworks and coding standards across the Payments team.
• Partner with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate business requirements into technical solutions balancing speed, safety, and regulatory needs.
• Lead high-stakes scaling and reliability initiatives, anticipating bottlenecks and driving improvements from postmortems.
• Mentor team members through design reviews and architectural guidance to accelerate growth of engineers.

Skills

Distributed systems design

Payment systems experience

High-volume platforms

Roadmap planning

Mentorship

Job description

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Payments team within the Platform organization.

You will own the architecture and technical direction of the payments infrastructure powering fiat on- and off-ramps, serving individual and institutional customers worldwide. You will define the multi-year technical strategy, drive scalable, fault-tolerant systems, and collaborate with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to meet regulatory needs.