Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Platform (Payment Rails)

Coinbase is a company dedicated to increasing economic freedom and is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join their Payment Rails team within the Platform organization. The role involves shaping the architecture of payment systems, ensuring reliability and efficiency while leading initiatives to enhance operational workflows.

Responsibilities:

• Own the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for scaling Payment Rails' partner integrations and routing across markets and payment options
• Build distributed systems that process high-volume payment traffic, designing for fault isolation, graceful degradation, observability, and clear SLOs for Tier-0/Tier-1 services
• Drive an AI-first approach to engineering workflows, identifying where AI-powered tools can accelerate development, improve code quality, and enhance operational efficiency
• Partner with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations to translate ambiguous business requirements into technical solutions that balance speed, safety, and regulatory needs
• Lead high-stakes scaling initiatives, anticipating bottlenecks before they occur and driving systematic improvements to how Coinbase moves money
• Strengthen the engineering bar by establishing paved roads, design patterns, and best practices, and by mentoring engineers through design reviews and coding standards

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional systems
• Demonstrated track record of architecting fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems that handle billions of dollars in transaction volume
• Led efforts to turn fragmented services 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
• History of influencing across teams 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