Staff Payments Systems Architect - Scale & Reliability

Coinbase, Inc.; Madison (WI); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own the Payments platform architecture and lead the multi-year strategy for scaling integrations, routing, and funds-flow across global markets.

You will build and evolve distributed systems that process billions of dollars in transaction volume, mentor engineers, and set high standards for reliability, observability, and performance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering with payments or high-volume platforms.
• Architected fault-tolerant distributed systems handling billions in transactions.
• Led platform-building initiatives with shared frameworks and unified APIs.
• Own production reliability and incident response across multiple teams.
• Influenced technical direction without direct authority in org-wide forums.
• Responsible use of generative AI with human oversight.

Responsibilities

• Own multi-year technical strategy and architecture for the Payments platform.
• Build and evolve distributed systems handling high-volume payment traffic.
• Drive engineering quality with shared frameworks and coding standards.
• Collaborate with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate requirements into technical solutions.
• Lead scaling and reliability initiatives and drive improvements from postmortems.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and architectural guidance.

Skills

Payments systems

Distributed systems

Reliability engineering

High-transaction platforms

Technical leadership

Architecture strategy

Job description

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own the Payments platform architecture and lead the multi-year strategy for scaling integrations, routing, and funds-flow across global markets.

You will build and evolve distributed systems that process billions of dollars in transaction volume, mentor engineers, and set high standards for reliability, observability, and performance.