Staff Backend Engineer, Secure Access & Auth

Coinbase; Nashville (TN); On-site; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team to shape authentication and authorization across our platforms. You will design and operate secure, low-latency services, balancing security with a simple user experience and enabling product teams at scale.

You’ll lead complex initiatives like signed tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, and device-aware authentication, while collaborating with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to meet regulatory

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience on distributed services.
• Strong proficiency in Go or equivalent systems language.
• Experience designing secure APIs and authorization flows (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE).
• Experience with gRPC and data stores like Redis or DynamoDB; observability via metrics/logs.
• Proven track record delivering cross-functional projects from design to production.
• Ability to communicate clearly with engineering, product, security teams.

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 platforms, with strong observability, failure testing, and measurable SLOs.
• Lead technical designs for complex initiatives such as signed authorization tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth.
• Partner with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to balance customer conversion, account protection, regulatory requirements, and engineering constraints.
• Simplify integration patterns and build self-service tooling that enables product teams to adopt access and authorization capabilities safely at scale.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through design reviews, pairing, code reviews, and on-call participation.

Skills

Go programming

Distributed systems

OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect

JWT / token handling

gRPC / Protocol Buffers

API security

System design & implementation

Cross-functional collaboration

AI tooling usage

Tools

Redis

DynamoDB

Protocol Buffers

gRPC

Job description

Coinbase is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team to shape authentication and authorization across our platforms. You will design and operate secure, low-latency services, balancing security with a simple user experience and enabling product teams at scale.

You’ll lead complex initiatives like signed tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, and device-aware authentication, while collaborating with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to meet regulatory