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 is Coinbase's gateway between the fiat and crypto economy, operating a network of payment integrations and routing that power 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 and technical direction of this network, designing and scaling systems that ensure every payment is reliable, efficient, and correct across an expanding set of markets, partners, and payment methods.

What you'll do:

• 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.

Required Skills and Experience:

• 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.

Job #: P76350