[Remote] Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Platform (Payment Rails)
Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Coinbase is a leading company in the crypto economy, dedicated to increasing economic freedom. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payment Rails team, where the role involves shaping the architecture and technical direction of payment integrations and routing systems for both individual and institutional customers.
Responsibilities
- Own the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for scaling Payment Rails' network of partner integrations and routing, enabling more customers to participate in the crypto economy across more markets and payment options
- Build complex distributed systems that process high-volume, high-reliability payment traffic, designing for fault isolation, graceful degradation, strong observability, and clear SLOs for Tier-0/Tier-1 services
- Drive an AI-first approach to engineering workflows by identifying where AI-powered tools can accelerate development, improve code quality, and enhance operational efficiency across the team and broader engineering org
- 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 requirements
- Lead high-stakes scaling initiatives, anticipating bottlenecks before they occur and driving proactive, systematic improvements to how Coinbase moves money
- Strengthen the engineering bar across Payment Rails and adjacent orgs by establishing paved roads, design patterns, and best practices, and by mentoring engineers through design reviews and coding standards
Skills
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including experience building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional systems
- Demonstrated track record of architecting fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems at scale that handle billions of dollars in transaction volume
- Led efforts to turn fragmented services and bespoke integrations into coherent, reusable platforms (e.g., shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi-tenant architectures)
- Proven ownership of production reliability, including leading high-severity incident response and driving systemic improvements from postmortems across multiple teams or domains
- History of influencing across teams and organizations without direct authority, driving consensus on high-impact technical decisions, and representing your area in org-level forums
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality
Benefits
- Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k))
Company Overview
Company H1B Sponsorship