Staff Backend Engineer, Payments Platform — Remote

Coinbase; Frankfort (KY); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for the Payments team within the Platform organization. You will own the architecture and technical direction of systems powering fiat on- and off-ramps for individual and institutional customers, processing billions in volume.

The role focuses on building and evolving scalable distributed systems, ensuring reliability, and partnering with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to meet regulatory needs.

Qualifications

• 8 years of experience in software engineering with payments, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional platforms.
• Proven track record of architecting fault-tolerant, reliable distributed systems at scale with billions in transaction volume.
• Led platform-building efforts to create coherent, reusable services and APIs.
• Experience owning production reliability and leading high-severity incident response across multiple teams.
• Ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority.
• Experience using generative AI responsibly to improve workflows while maintaining human oversight.

Responsibilities

• Own the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for the Payments platform, defining the roadmap for scaling integrations and funds-flow systems across global markets.
• Build and evolve distributed systems that process high-volume payment traffic, with fault isolation and observable metrics.
• 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 scalable technical solutions.
• Lead high-stakes scaling and reliability initiatives and drive improvements from incident postmortems.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and architectural guidance to accelerate team growth.

Skills

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Production reliability

AI governance

Cross-functional collaboration

High-volume payments

System architecture

Job description

Coinbase is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for the Payments team within the Platform organization. You will own the architecture and technical direction of systems powering fiat on- and off-ramps for individual and institutional customers, processing billions in volume.

The role focuses on building and evolving scalable distributed systems, ensuring reliability, and partnering with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to meet regulatory needs.