Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Platform (Payment Rails)

We’re hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payment Rails team within the Platform organization. Payment Rails powers fiat on- and off-ramps for individual and institutional customers, moving hundreds of billions of dollars in transaction volume each year. You’ll shape the architecture of this network, designing and scaling systems that ensure every payment is reliable, efficient, and correct.

What you’ll do:

• 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.

• 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.

The role involves owning the architecture and technical direction of Payment Rails infrastructure, designing high-reliability systems for global payment processing, and leading cross-functional collaborations to create efficient, compliant solutions. Responsibilities also include mentoring team members and enhancing operational excellence through AI-driven improvements. The summary above was generated by AI

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.” learn more about working at Coinbase.