Staff Software Engineer, Identity & Access (Remote-First)

Coinbase; Denver (CO); On-site; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Coinbase is seeking a Staff Software Engineer on the Access & Authorization team to shape authentication and authorization across the platform. You will design and operate distributed services, balancing security with a smooth user experience, impacting Coinbase's web, mobile, API, and partner ecosystems.

You will mentor engineers, lead complex initiatives like tokens, passkeys, and device-aware authentication, and collaborate with product, security, and infra teams to maintain reliability and

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience with Go or similar systems language.
• Experience designing secure APIs with OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE or related standards.
• Experience building low-latency, high-throughput distributed services in production.
• Strong in creating scalable authentication and authorization capabilities.
• Experience with gRPC and data stores like Redis or DynamoDB, with solid observability.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end design and operation of authentication and authorization capabilities, including 2FA and token handling.
• Build secure Go and gRPC services used across Coinbase products with strong observability and SLOs.
• Lead technical designs for initiatives like signed tokens, passkeys, device-aware auth, and mobile OAuth.
• Partner with product, security, fraud, and infra teams to balance security, user experience, and regulatory needs.
• Create self-service tooling to enable product teams to adopt access controls at scale.
• Mentor engineers through reviews, pairing, and on-call participation.

Skills

Go

OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect

gRPC

Distributed systems

APIs security

Redis/DynamoDB

JWTs/Tokens

Mentoring/Reviews

Tools

Protocol Buffers

Redis

DynamoDB

Observability tooling

Job description

Coinbase is seeking a Staff Software Engineer on the Access & Authorization team to shape authentication and authorization across the platform. You will design and operate distributed services, balancing security with a smooth user experience, impacting Coinbase's web, mobile, API, and partner ecosystems.

You will mentor engineers, lead complex initiatives like tokens, passkeys, and device-aware authentication, and collaborate with product, security, and infra teams to maintain reliability and