Staff Software Engineer, Access & Authorization

Coinbase, Inc.; City of Albany (NY); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team within the Platform group. You will design and operate authentication and authorization capabilities that balance security with a simple user experience, enabling Coinbase products and partner integrations.

You will build secure Go and gRPC services with strong observability, participate in design reviews, and collaborate with product, security, and infra teams to meet regulatory and engineering constraints.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience with Go or a similar language.
• Experience designing secure APIs and reasoning about authentication, authorization, session management, and token handling.
• Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores such as Redis or DynamoDB.
• Track record of delivering complex, cross-functional projects with clear communication.
• Responsible use of generative AI with human oversight.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, recovery, and edge authorization.
• Build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services across Coinbase products with observability and SLOs.
• Lead technical designs for signed tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth.
• Collaborate with product, security, fraud, and infra teams to balance conversion, protection, and compliance.
• Create self-service tooling to enable product teams to adopt access controls at scale.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing, code reviews, and on-call participation.

Skills

Go backend development

OAuth/OpenID Connect/JWT

gRPC & Protocol Buffers

Distributed systems

Security-focused API design

AI governance in engineering

Tools

Redis

DynamoDB

Protocol Buffers

Job description

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team within the Platform group. You will design and operate authentication and authorization capabilities that balance security with a simple user experience, enabling Coinbase products and partner integrations.

You will build secure Go and gRPC services with strong observability, participate in design reviews, and collaborate with product, security, and infra teams to meet regulatory and engineering constraints.