Staff Software Engineer — Secure Access & Authorization

Coinbase, Inc.; Des Moines (IA); Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 257,000; Full time

Job summary

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team within the Platform group. You'll help shape authentication and authorization capabilities that balance security with a seamless user experience across Coinbase products and partner integrations.

You will build secure Go services, discuss designs with product, security, and infra teams, and mentor engineers. This role emphasizes reliability, observability, and delivering scalable access control across

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience with Go or a similar systems-oriented language.
• Design secure APIs and reason about authentication, authorization, session management, and token handling (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE).
• Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores such as Redis or DynamoDB, with strong observability and SLOs.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of capabilities across authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, account recovery, and edge authorization.
• Build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services used across Coinbase's web, mobile, API, and partner experiences, with strong observability, failure testing, and measurable SLOs.
• Lead technical designs for complex initiatives such as signed authorization tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth.
• Partner with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to balance customer conversion, account protection, regulatory requirements, and engineering constraints.
• Simplify integration patterns and build self-service tooling that enables product teams to adopt access and authorization capabilities safely at scale.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through design reviews, pairing, code reviews, and on-call participation.

Skills

Go backend

OAuth 2.0

OpenID Connect

JWTs

PKCE

gRPC

Observability

Tools

Protocol Buffers

Redis

DynamoDB

Job description

Coinbase, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team within the Platform group. You'll help shape authentication and authorization capabilities that balance security with a seamless user experience across Coinbase products and partner integrations.

You will build secure Go services, discuss designs with product, security, and infra teams, and mentor engineers. This role emphasizes reliability, observability, and delivering scalable access control across