Staff Software Engineer, Payments Platform - Global Scale

Coinbase, Inc.; Juneau (AK); Remote; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase, a remote-first company, is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for the Payments team within the Platform organization. You will own multi-year strategy and architecture for global payment integrations, and build fault-tolerant distributed systems with strong observability and SLOs.

You will mentor engineers and collaborate with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to balance speed with safety. The role emphasizes leadership in scaling, reliability, and cross-team architectural

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including hands-on building of payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional platforms.
• Architecting and delivering fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems at scale, processing billions in transaction volume.
• Led platform-building efforts to create coherent, reusable systems (shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi-tenant architectures).
• Experience owning production reliability, leading high-severity incident response, and driving systemic improvements across teams.
• Ability to influence technical direction without direct authority; participate in architecture forums.
• Uses generative AI responsibly with human oversight to improve workflows, cost, and quality.

Responsibilities

• Own the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for the Payments platform and roadmap for scaling integrations across global markets.
• Build and evolve distributed systems that handle high-volume payment traffic with observability and clear SLOs.
• Raise engineering quality by establishing shared frameworks and coding standards across the Payments team and adjacent orgs.
• Collaborate with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Lead scaling and reliability initiatives, anticipate bottlenecks, and drive improvements from postmortems.
• Mentor teammates through design reviews and architectural guidance to accelerate growth.

Skills

Distributed systems

Payment systems

High-volume transactions

Reliability/Incident response

Technical leadership

Architectural strategy

Mentorship

Generative AI awareness

Job description

Coinbase, a remote-first company, is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for the Payments team within the Platform organization. You will own multi-year strategy and architecture for global payment integrations, and build fault-tolerant distributed systems with strong observability and SLOs.

You will mentor engineers and collaborate with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to balance speed with safety. The role emphasizes leadership in scaling, reliability, and cross-team architectural