Staff Software Engineer, Payments Platform — Remote & Equity

The Briefed; United States; Remote; USD 210,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Compensation & equity options

Health, dental, and vision plans

401(k) retirement savings plan

Remote-first with quarterly in-person

Surges: quarterly in-person sessions

Job summary

Coinbase is a remote-first, high-intensity environment hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payments team within the Platform organization. You will own the architecture and multi-year technical direction of Tier-0/Tier-1 systems, ensuring every transaction is reliable, fault-tolerant, and compliant as Coinbase expands globally.

The role focuses on building fault-tolerant distributed systems at global scale, leading platform initiatives to unify microservices, and driving incident

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Deep hands-on experience architecting and operating payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional platforms processing billions in volume.
• Proven track record of building fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems operating at global scale.
• Demonstrated experience leading platform efforts that transform fragmented microservices into unified, reusable systems (e.g., shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi-tenant architectures).
• Proven ownership of production reliability, leading high-severity incident response, and driving systemic postmortem actions across teams.
• History of influencing technical strategy and architecture across organizations without direct authority.

Responsibilities

• Own the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for the Payments platform, defining the long-term roadmap for scaling payment routing, integrations, and funds-flow systems.
• Architect and evolve resilient distributed systems processing high-volume payment traffic, designing for fault isolation, graceful degradation, observability, and strict SLOs.
• Drive technical quality by establishing paved roads, shared frameworks, and coding standards that elevate the engineering bar across the organization.
• Partner with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate complex business and regulatory goals into scalable technical architectures.
• Lead high-stakes scaling and reliability initiatives, anticipating system bottlenecks before they impact customers and driving systemic improvements from incident postmortems.
• Accelerate the growth of engineers across the org through hands-on architectural guidance, design reviews, and engineering leadership.

Skills

Distributed systems

Payments systems

Technical leadership

Reliability engineering

Platform architecture

AI workflows

Job description

Coinbase is a remote-first, high-intensity environment hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payments team within the Platform organization. You will own the architecture and multi-year technical direction of Tier-0/Tier-1 systems, ensuring every transaction is reliable, fault-tolerant, and compliant as Coinbase expands globally.

The role focuses on building fault-tolerant distributed systems at global scale, leading platform initiatives to unify microservices, and driving incident