Staff Software Engineer, Payments Platform (Remote-First)

Coinbase, Inc.; Denver (CO); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payments team within the Platform organization. You will own the architecture and technical direction of payments systems that power fiat on- and off-ramps for individual and institutional customers, processing billions of dollars in transaction volume across global markets.

You will lead multi-year technical strategy, build fault-tolerant distributed systems, and drive reliability initiatives while mentoring engineers and coordinating

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with payments or high-volume systems.
• Proven track record architecting fault-tolerant distributed systems at scale handling billions in transactions.
• Led platform-building efforts transforming fragmented services into coherent, reusable systems.
• Proven experience owning production reliability and incident response across multiple teams or domains.
• Influences technical direction across teams without direct authority; participates in architecture forums.

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, 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

System architecture

Leadership

Incident response

Cross-team collaboration

Job description

Coinbase is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payments team within the Platform organization. You will own the architecture and technical direction of payments systems that power fiat on- and off-ramps for individual and institutional customers, processing billions of dollars in transaction volume across global markets.

You will lead multi-year technical strategy, build fault-tolerant distributed systems, and drive reliability initiatives while mentoring engineers and coordinating