Staff Software Engineer - Secure Access & Authorization

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

Job summary

Coinbase seeks a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team in the Platform group. You will design and operate authentication, authorization, and session capabilities across services used by Coinbase products and partners.

Responsibilities include building high-throughput Go/gRPC services with strong observability, leading complex security initiatives, and collaborating with product, security, and infra teams to balance user experience with protection and compliance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience with Go or a comparable systems-oriented language.
• Experience designing secure APIs and reasoning 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 observability practices (metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and SLOs).
• Track record delivering complex, cross-functional projects from design to production with strong communication across teams.
• Responsible use of generative AI to improve workflows while maintaining human oversight.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, and edge authorization.
• Build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services used across Coinbase’s web, mobile, API, and partner experiences.
• Lead technical designs for signed authorization tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth.
• Partner with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to balance conversion, protection, and regulatory requirements.
• Simplify integration patterns and build self-service tooling for product teams to adopt access capabilities safely at scale.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing, code reviews, and on-call participation.

Skills

Go

Distributed systems

OAuth

OpenID Connect

JWTs

PKCE

gRPC

Protobufs

Redis

DynamoDB

Tools

Redis

DynamoDB

Job description

Coinbase seeks a Staff Software Engineer for the Access & Authorization team in the Platform group. You will design and operate authentication, authorization, and session capabilities across services used by Coinbase products and partners.

Responsibilities include building high-throughput Go/gRPC services with strong observability, leading complex security initiatives, and collaborating with product, security, and infra teams to balance user experience with protection and compliance.