Staff Software Engineer, Payments Platform — Global Scale

Coinbase, Inc.; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for the Payments team within the Platform organization. You will own the architecture and technical direction of the payments systems that power fiat on- and off-ramps for individuals and institutions, processing billions of dollars in transaction volume globally.

You will drive multi-year strategy, build scalable, reliable distributed systems, and partner with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Ops to deliver safe, compliant solutions while mentoring

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including hands-on experience building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional platforms.
• Led platform-building efforts that transformed fragmented services into coherent, reusable systems (e.g., shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi-tenant architectures).
• Proven experience owning production reliability, leading high-severity incident response, and driving systemic improvements across multiple teams or domains.
• History of influencing technical direction across teams and organizations without direct authority, including representing your area in org-level architecture and strategy forums.
• Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.

Responsibilities

• Own the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for the Payments platform, defining the roadmap for scaling integrations, routing, and funds-flow systems across global markets.
• Build and evolve distributed systems that process high-volume payment traffic, designing for fault isolation, graceful degradation, observability, and clear SLOs for Tier-0/Tier-1 services.
• Drive engineering quality by establishing paved roads, shared frameworks, and coding standards that elevate the technical bar across the Payments team and adjacent orgs.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate ambiguous business requirements into well-scoped technical solutions that balance speed, safety, and regulatory needs.
• Lead high-stakes scaling and reliability initiatives, anticipating bottlenecks before they occur and driving systematic improvements from incident postmortems.
• Strengthen team capabilities through hands-on mentorship, design reviews, and architectural guidance that accelerate the growth of engineers across the team.

Skills

Payments systems

Distributed systems

Platform architecture

Reliability engineering

Cross-functional collaboration

Incident response

AI governance

Influence without authority

Tools

Unified APIs

Multi-tenant architectures

Job description

Coinbase is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for the Payments team within the Platform organization. You will own the architecture and technical direction of the payments systems that power fiat on- and off-ramps for individuals and institutions, processing billions of dollars in transaction volume globally.

You will drive multi-year strategy, build scalable, reliable distributed systems, and partner with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Ops to deliver safe, compliant solutions while mentoring