Staff Payments Platform Architect — Scale Globally

Coinbase, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payments team within the Platform organization. You will own the architecture and technical direction of payments systems powering fiat on- and off-ramps for individuals and institutions.

The role focuses on building scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems, driving reliability, and partnering with cross-functional teams to meet regulatory needs. Remote-friendly with quarterly in-person surges.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering with payments or high-volume platforms.
• Architecting fault-tolerant distributed systems at scale.
• Ownership of production reliability and incident response.
• Influencing technical direction across teams and orgs.

Responsibilities

• Own the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for the Payments platform, defining the roadmap for scaling integrations, routing, and funds-flow systems across global markets.
• Build and evolve distributed systems that process high-volume payment traffic, designing for fault isolation, observability, and clear SLOs for Tier-0/Tier-1 services.
• Drive engineering quality by establishing paved roads, shared frameworks, and coding standards that elevate the technical bar across the Payments team and adjacent orgs.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate ambiguous business requirements into well-scoped technical solutions that balance speed, safety, and regulatory needs.
• Lead high-stakes scaling and reliability initiatives, anticipating bottlenecks before they occur and driving systematic improvements from incident postmortems.
• Strengthen team capabilities through hands‑on mentorship, design reviews, and architectural guidance that accelerate the growth of engineers across the team.

Skills

Payments systems

Distributed systems

Production reliability

Platform architecture

Technical leadership

Generative AI usage

Job description

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payments team within the Platform organization. You will own the architecture and technical direction of payments systems powering fiat on- and off-ramps for individuals and institutions.

The role focuses on building scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems, driving reliability, and partnering with cross-functional teams to meet regulatory needs. Remote-friendly with quarterly in-person surges.