Staff Backend Engineer — Secure Access & Authorization

Coinbase, Inc.; Sacramento (CA); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase is a remote-first company with quarterly in-person surges. We seek a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team in the Platform group to design and operate secure authentication and authorization capabilities that scale across Coinbase products and partner integrations.

You will build low-latency Go services, own end-to-end lifecycle of OAuth/session/token handling, and collaborate with product, security, fraud, and infra teams to balance user experience with security

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience.
• Experience designing secure APIs and handling authentication/authorization.
• Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores (Redis/DynamoDB).

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 services used across Coinbase's web, mobile, API, and partner experiences with observability and SLOs.
• Lead technical designs for complex initiatives like signed tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, and device-aware auth.
• Partner with product, security, fraud, and infra teams to balance user experience with security and regulatory requirements.
• Simplify integration patterns and build self-service tooling for scaling access controls across products.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through reviews, pairing, and on-call participation.

Skills

Backend engineering

Go language

APIs design

Generative AI

Tools

gRPC

Protocol Buffers

Redis

DynamoDB

Job description

Coinbase is a remote-first company with quarterly in-person surges. We seek a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team in the Platform group to design and operate secure authentication and authorization capabilities that scale across Coinbase products and partner integrations.

You will build low-latency Go services, own end-to-end lifecycle of OAuth/session/token handling, and collaborate with product, security, fraud, and infra teams to balance user experience with security