Senior Staff Software Engineer, Payments
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As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Payments Platform team within the Platform group, you'll define the engineering vision for how fiat moves into and out of Coinbase across 50+ countries and payment rails. Payments Platform is the bridge between the traditional financial world and the crypto economy, building the on- and off-ramps that power reliable, seamless payment processing at global scale. You'll shape architectural cohesion across rails, orchestration, and funds-flow systems while driving platform-level reliability, cost efficiency, and readiness for significant volume growth.
What you'll do:
- Own the multi-quarter technical strategy for Payments spanning rails integrations, orchestration, routing, and funds-flow services to support new products, geographies, and significant growth in payment volume.
- Architect the core Payments platform for high availability, low latency, and cost efficiency at global scale, enforcing technical standards for financial correctness including idempotency, reconciliation, failure-mode handling, and auditability across all money-movement paths.
- Lead end-to-end design and rollout of large cross-team initiatives (e.g., new global rails, platform decompositions, resiliency programs), breaking high ambiguity into clear milestones and measurable outcomes.
- Partner with FinHub, Payments Risk, Regulatory Platform, and Product to design cohesive architectures that balance customer experience, risk controls, compliance, and unit economics.
- Drive systematic reliability and efficiency improvements using observability signals (success rates, latency, cost, incident patterns) to identify and resolve structural platform gaps.
- Represent Payments in executive and cross-org forums, communicating tradeoffs clearly, aligning stakeholders on strategy, and mentoring senior/staff engineers across pods on system design quality and long-term maintainability.
Required Skills and Experience:
- 12+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production, with deep money-movement architecture experience (PSPs, ISO 20022, routing, double-entry, high-volume payment systems).
- Deep expertise in backend programming (e.g., Go, Python, Java) and cloud-native architecture, with a proven track record designing highly available, high-performance financial systems.
- Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional technical initiatives spanning multiple teams, anticipate scaling bottlenecks proactively, and drive systematic platform improvements.
- Experience with ledgering, reconciliation, or settlement systems at scale, with strong financial acumen for handling accounting data and transactions with high precision.
- Proven ability to distill complex technical concepts into clear, actionable solutions for both engineering and executive audiences.
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.
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Pay Transparency Notice: Base salary varies by location (see range below). Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)).
- Application Limit: Candidates may submit a maximum of 3 applications within a 6-month period.
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- AI Disclosure: Coinbase is piloting an AI tool based on machine learning technologies to conduct initial screening interviews to qualified applicants. The tool simulates realistic interview scenarios and engages in dynamic conversation. Coinbase is also piloting an AI interview intelligence platform to transcribe and summarize interview notes, allowing our interviewers to fully focus on you as the candidate. Coinbase will not use AI to make decisions impacting employment.