Senior Staff Software Engineer, Payments

Ready to do the most impactful work of your career? At Coinbase, we are uncompromising on our mission to increase economic freedom. The bar is high, the environment is intense, and we like it that way. This isn't a place for complacency, it’s a place to be pushed past your perceived limits. If you're ready to build the future of finance alongside people who refuse to settle for "good enough," you belong here.

Coinbase is a remote-first, but not remote-only company. Expect to get together quarterly for intense in-person working sessions called “surges.”

Payments Platform

Our mission is to move old money into crypto and power financial access and payments for the crypto economy globally. As the bridge between the traditional financial world and the crypto economy, we build and operate the fiat on- and off-ramps and payment services that let Coinbase’s customer-facing products deliver reliable, seamless payment processing and connect customer fiat funds into crypto.

Job Duties

Define and drive the multi‑quarter technical strategy for Payments, spanning rails, orchestration, and transfers, to support new products, geos, and significant growth in payment volume.

Architect and evolve the core Payments platform (rails integrations, routing, and funds-flow services) for high availability, low latency, and cost efficiency at global scale.

Lead end‑to‑end design and rollout of large, cross‑team initiatives (e.g., new global rails, decomp/migrations, resiliency programs), breaking high ambiguity into clear milestones and measurable outcomes.

Set and enforce technical standards for financial correctness across Payments, including idempotency, reconciliation, failure‑mode handling, and auditability for all money‑movement paths.

Partner closely with FinHub, Payments Risk, Regulatory Platform, and Product to design cohesive architectures that balance customer experience, risk controls, compliance, and unit economics.

Provide deep technical mentorship to senior/staff engineers across Payments pods, upleveling system design quality, review rigor, and long‑term maintainability.

Use data and observability signals (e.g., success rates, latency, cost, incident patterns) to identify structural platform gaps and lead systematic reliability and efficiency improvements.

Job Requirements

• 10+ years building and operating large‑scale distributed systems in production.
• Deep money‑movement architecture experience (PSPs, ISO 20022, routing, double‑entry, high‑volume payment systems)
• Deep expertise in backend programming (e.g., Python, Go, Java) and cloud‑native architecture.
• Proven track record designing highly available, high‑performance systems.
• Ability to anticipate scaling bottlenecks before they occur and take decisive, proactive measures.
• Experience leading cross‑functional technical initiatives and mentoring senior engineers.

Nice to Haves

• Experience designing and operating ledgering or trading systems at large scale.
• Strong financial acumen with experience handling accounting data and financial transactions with high precision and reliability.
• Experience collaborating closely with finance and accounting teams.