Staff Backend Engineer - Identity IDV Platform & Trust Engine

Coinbase, Inc.; Carson City (NV); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own the multi-year technical vision for Coinbase's Identity IDV platform within Platform.

This role leads end-to-end architecture, shapes APIs, and drives platform consolidation across products and regions to enable scalable, vendor-agnostic identity verification at global scale. You will guide the cross-team strategy, mentor engineers, and ensure reliable, compliant fintech systems while expanding the platform to support new modalities and

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend software engineering in regulated or fintech environments.
• Proven technical leadership owning end-to-end design and delivery of complex, cross-team backend systems, including system design, architecture, API/data-model design, and production rollout.
• Deep distributed-systems expertise spanning scalability, reliability, API design, and high availability for Tier-0 services.
• Expert-level coding in Go (or equivalent systems language) with hands-on experience in gRPC/microservices, AWS, and Kubernetes.
• Experience in identity, KYC, fraud infrastructure, vendor orchestration, or payments domains with the ability to turn ambiguous compliance and platform problems into actionable technical roadmaps.
• 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 architecture and technical direction for Coinbase's IDV platform - the decision engine, vendor orchestration layer, and verification infrastructure that all business lines depend on.
• Lead platform consolidation by migrating all IDV onto a single decision-engine-driven platform, retiring 100+ legacy rules and fragmented paths, and eliminating single-vendor points of failure.
• Design and build vendor-agnostic orchestration with automated, real-time routing and failover that selects the optimal vendor per request and dynamically balances fraud prevention (FAR) against user access (FRR/SCR).
• Scale the platform to support every new product, region, and verification modality (document, biometric, liveness) with self-serve configuration so any Coinbase team integrates IDV without a dependency request.
• Drive cross-team technical strategy and set the abstractions, APIs, and platform patterns that the broader Identity org builds on, influencing at the Staff level across multiple pods.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Go programming

gRPC

Microservices

AWS

Kubernetes

System design

API design

Leadership

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

gRPC

Job description

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own the multi-year technical vision for Coinbase's Identity IDV platform within Platform.

This role leads end-to-end architecture, shapes APIs, and drives platform consolidation across products and regions to enable scalable, vendor-agnostic identity verification at global scale. You will guide the cross-team strategy, mentor engineers, and ensure reliable, compliant fintech systems while expanding the platform to support new modalities and