Staff Backend Engineer, Secure Access & Authorization

Coinbase, Inc.; Helena (MT); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team. You will design and operate authentication capabilities, balancing security and user experience across Coinbase products and partner integrations.

You'll build secure Go and gRPC services, own end-to-end designs for OAuth, sessions, and tokens, and mentor others while collaborating with product, security, and infra teams in a remote-first environment with quarterly in-person surges.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience with Go or similar systems language.
• Experience designing secure APIs and reasoning about authentication, authorization, session management, trust boundaries, and token handling (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE).
• Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores such as Redis or DynamoDB, with strong operational instincts using metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and SLOs to run critical services.
• Track record of delivering complex, cross-functional projects from technical design through production rollout, with clear written and verbal communication that aligns engineering, security, product, and infrastructure partners.
• 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 design, implementation, and operation of capabilities across authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, account recovery, and edge authorization.
• Build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services used across Coinbase's web, mobile, API, and partner experiences, 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

Distributed systems

OAuth 2.0 / OIDC

gRPC / Protobufs

Redis / DynamoDB

Security awareness

Tools

Redis

DynamoDB

Protobuf

Job description

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team. You will design and operate authentication capabilities, balancing security and user experience across Coinbase products and partner integrations.

You'll build secure Go and gRPC services, own end-to-end designs for OAuth, sessions, and tokens, and mentor others while collaborating with product, security, and infra teams in a remote-first environment with quarterly in-person surges.