Staff Engineer, Access & Authorization — Remote-First

Coinbase, Inc.; Charleston (WV); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to shape authentication and authorization across our platform. You will design and operate secure, low-latency Go services used by Coinbase products and partner integrations, with strong observability and compliance with security standards.

You'll collaborate with product, security, fraud, and infra teams, mentor engineers, and drive initiatives from design to production, including edge tokens, passkeys, and device-aware authentication.

Qualifications

• 8+ years backend software engineering experience with Go or a similar systems language.
• Experience designing secure APIs and reasoning about authentication, authorization, and token handling (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs).
• Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores such as Redis or DynamoDB; strong observability and SLOs.
• Proven track record delivering cross-functional projects with clear written and verbal communication.
• Uses generative AI responsibly with human oversight to improve workflows.

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

OpenID Connect

JWTs

gRPC

Protocol Buffers

Redis

DynamoDB

Observability

SLOs

Security

AI with oversight

Job description

Coinbase is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to shape authentication and authorization across our platform. You will design and operate secure, low-latency Go services used by Coinbase products and partner integrations, with strong observability and compliance with security standards.

You'll collaborate with product, security, fraud, and infra teams, mentor engineers, and drive initiatives from design to production, including edge tokens, passkeys, and device-aware authentication.