Staff Software Engineer (Platform - Access & Authorization)

Coinbase is a company committed to increasing economic freedom and is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for their Access & Authorization team. In this role, you will design and implement authentication and authorization systems, ensuring a balance between security and user experience.

Responsibilities:

• Own end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of capabilities across authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, account recovery, and edge authorization
• Build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services used across Coinbase's web, mobile, API, and partner experiences, with strong observability, failure testing, and measurable SLOs
• Lead technical designs for complex initiatives such as signed authorization tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth
• Partner with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to balance customer conversion, account protection, regulatory requirements, and engineering constraints
• Simplify integration patterns and build self-service tooling that enables product teams to adopt access and authorization capabilities safely at scale
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through design reviews, pairing, code reviews, and on-call participation

Requirements:

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience with strong proficiency in Go or a comparable systems-oriented language, including building and operating reliable, high-throughput distributed services in production
• Demonstrated experience designing secure APIs and reasoning about authentication, authorization, session management, trust boundaries, and token handling (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE, or related standards)
• Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores such as Redis or DynamoDB, with strong operational instincts using metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and SLOs to run critical services
• Track record of delivering complex, cross-functional projects from technical design through production rollout, with clear written and verbal communication that aligns engineering, security, product, and infrastructure partners
• Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality