Staff Software Engineer, Access & Authorization at Scale

Coinbase, Inc.; Richmond (VA); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Bonus eligibility

Medical

Dental

Vision

401(k)

Job summary

Coinbase is a remote-first company focused on increasing economic freedom. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Access & Authorization team, you will design and operate secure authentication and authorization capabilities that scale across Coinbase products and partner integrations.

You’ll build Go and gRPC services, lead complex designs such as signed tokens and passkeys, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product, security, and infra teams while balancing security with a smooth user

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience with Go or a comparable systems language.
• Experience designing secure APIs and managing authentication/authorization, sessions, tokens, and OAuth 2.0/OpenID Connect.
• Proficiency with gRPC and data stores like Redis or DynamoDB, with strong observability and SLOs.
• Track record delivering complex cross-functional projects and communicating with engineering, security, product, and infra teams.
• Employs AI responsibly with human oversight to improve workflows.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, and edge authorization.
• Build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services used across Coinbase products and partners.
• Lead technical designs for tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware auth, and mobile OAuth.
• Partner with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to balance conversion, protection, and regulatory requirements.
• Simplify integration patterns and build self-service tooling for safe adoption at scale.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing, code reviews, and on-call participation.

Skills

Go

Distributed systems

API design

OAuth 2.0

OpenID Connect

gRPC

Observability

Tools

Redis

DynamoDB

Protocol Buffers

JWT

Job description

Coinbase is a remote-first company focused on increasing economic freedom. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Access & Authorization team, you will design and operate secure authentication and authorization capabilities that scale across Coinbase products and partner integrations.

You’ll build Go and gRPC services, lead complex designs such as signed tokens and passkeys, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product, security, and infra teams while balancing security with a smooth user