Staff Backend Engineer — Secure Auth & Access

Coinbase, Inc.; Little Rock (AR); On-site; 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 and authorization systems, building high-throughput Go and gRPC services used across Coinbase products and partners.

You will lead token, 2FA, and device-aware auth initiatives, working with product, security, and infra teams to balance security with usability. Strong communications and cross-team collaboration are essential.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience with Go or a comparable systems language.
• Experience designing secure APIs and reasoning about authentication, authorization, session management, and tokens (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs).
• Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores such as Redis or DynamoDB, with observability and SLOs.
• Track record delivering complex cross-functional projects with strong communication across teams.
• Uses generative AI responsibly with human oversight to improve workflows and quality.

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 across Coinbase web, mobile, API, and partner experiences with strong observability and SLOs.
• Lead technical designs for signed tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth.
• Partner with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to balance conversion, protection, compliance, and constraints.
• Simplify integration patterns and build self-service tooling for safe adoption at scale.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through reviews, pairing, and on-call participation.

Skills

Backend Go

OAuth/OpenID Connect

JWTs/PKCE

Distributed systems

Security-aware design

Tools

gRPC

Protocol Buffers

Redis

DynamoDB

Job description

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team. You will design and operate authentication and authorization systems, building high-throughput Go and gRPC services used across Coinbase products and partners.

You will lead token, 2FA, and device-aware auth initiatives, working with product, security, and infra teams to balance security with usability. Strong communications and cross-team collaboration are essential.