.png)
Easy Apply
Easy Apply
Define and drive Payments technical strategy and architecture for rails, routing, and funds-flow systems. Lead large cross-team initiatives, ensure financial correctness, improve reliability and cost via observability, mentor senior engineers, and align stakeholders across product, risk, and regulatory teams.
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.
As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Platform Payments team, you'll define the engineering vision for how fiat moves into and out of Coinbase across 50+ countries and payment rails. This team builds and operates the fiat on- and off-ramps, routing, orchestration, and funds-flow services that power every customer-facing payment experience. You'll own the multi-quarter technical strategy, architect for global scale and reliability, and drive platform-level improvements that directly impact payment success rates, latency, and cost efficiency.
What you'll do:
- Define and drive the multi-quarter technical strategy for Payments spanning rails, orchestration, and transfers to support new products, geos, and significant growth in payment volume.
- Architect and evolve the core Payments platform (rails integrations, routing, and funds-flow services) for high availability, low latency, and cost efficiency at global scale.
- Lead end-to-end design and rollout of large, cross-team initiatives (e.g., new global rails, decomp/migrations, resiliency programs), breaking ambiguity into clear milestones and measurable outcomes.
- Set and enforce technical standards for financial correctness across Payments, including idempotency, reconciliation, failure-mode handling, and auditability for all money-movement paths.
- Partner with FinHub, Payments Risk, Regulatory Platform, and Product to design cohesive architectures that balance customer experience, risk controls, compliance, and unit economics.
- Provide deep technical mentorship to senior and staff engineers across Payments pods, upleveling system design quality, review rigor, and long-term maintainability.
Required Skills and Experience:
- 10+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production, with deep expertise in backend programming (e.g., Go, Java, Python) and cloud-native architecture.
- Deep money-movement architecture experience including PSPs, ISO 20022, routing, double-entry ledgering, and high-volume payment systems.
- Proven track record designing highly available, high-performance systems with the ability to anticipate scaling bottlenecks and address them proactively.
- Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives across multiple engineering teams and mentoring senior engineers in system design and long-term maintainability.
- Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical tradeoffs clearly to executive and cross-org stakeholders and secure alignment on high-impact technical decisions.
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.
Job ID: P77633
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)).
Annual base salary range (excluding equity and bonus):
$260,100—$260,100 USD
- Application Limit: Candidates may submit a maximum of 3 applications within a 6-month period.
- Equal Opportunity Employer: Coinbase is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or genetic information. Applicants with criminal histories will be considered consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws.
- US Applicants: View Employee Rights, Know Your Rights, and E-Verify Notice of Participation.
- Accommodations: If you are an individual with a disability who needs a reasonable accommodation, email us your request and contact info at accommodations[at]coinbase.com. Need screen reading technology? Click here to download a free compatible screen reader and view the tutorial.
- Data Privacy & Arbitration: By submitting your application, you agree to our Candidate Privacy Notice. US applicants: By submitting your application, you agree to Arbitration of Disputes.
Similar Jobs at Coinbase
Artificial Intelligence • Blockchain • Fintech • Financial Services • Cryptocurrency • NFT • Web3
Build and operate foundational developer infrastructure across CI, build systems, deployment orchestration, and test platforms. Improve build speed, deployment safety, test reliability, observability, and engineering productivity at scale. Own services from architecture through production, including SLOs and on-call operations. Lead cross-functional technical projects, partner with engineering teams, mentor engineers, and shape platform strategy.
Top Skills:
AWSCi/CdContainersDatadogDistributed SystemsGenerative AiGithub ActionsGoKubernetesTerraform
Artificial Intelligence • Blockchain • Fintech • Financial Services • Cryptocurrency • NFT • Web3
Own the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for Coinbase’s enterprise IAM platform spanning human, AI agent, service, and workload identities. Drive adoption across 700+ systems, establish authentication and authorization standards, lead migrations and build-versus-buy decisions, automate audit and regulatory controls, reduce standing privilege, and mentor senior engineering talent. Partner across Security, Compliance, IT, Infrastructure, and product teams while influencing technical direction without direct authority.
Top Skills:
AWSDistributed SystemsGenerative AiGoIamOauth 2.0OidcSAMLScimWorkload Identity Federation
Artificial Intelligence • Blockchain • Fintech • Financial Services • Cryptocurrency • NFT • Web3
Design, build, and operate foundational developer infrastructure across CI, build systems, deployment orchestration, and test platforms. Improve build speed, deployment safety, and test reliability while owning services end to end, including SLOs, observability, and on-call responsibilities. Partner with engineering teams to address platform pain points and lead cross-cutting technical projects through production.
Top Skills:
Build SystemsCi/CdDeployment OrchestrationObservabilitySlosTest Infrastructure
What you need to know about the Chicago Tech Scene
With vibrant neighborhoods, great food and more affordable housing than either coast, Chicago might be the most liveable major tech hub. It is the birthplace of modern commodities and futures trading, a national hub for logistics and commerce, and home to the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association. This diverse blend of industry influences has helped Chicago emerge as a major player in verticals like fintech, biotechnology, legal tech, e-commerce and logistics technology. It’s also a major hiring center for tech companies on both coasts.
Key Facts About Chicago Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 245,800; 5.2% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: McDonald’s, John Deere, Boeing, Morningstar
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, fintech, software, logistics technology
- Funding Landscape: $2.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Arch Venture Partners, MATH Venture Partners, Jump Capital, Hyde Park Venture Partners
- Research Centers and Universities: Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Institute of Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
