[Remote] Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Payments Platform
Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Coinbase is a remote-first company dedicated to increasing economic freedom. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payments team, responsible for building and operating the infrastructure that supports high-volume payment processing.
Responsibilities
- Own the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for the Payments platform, defining the roadmap for scaling integrations, routing, and funds-flow systems across global markets
- Build and evolve 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 engineering quality by establishing paved roads, shared frameworks, and coding standards that elevate the technical bar across the Payments team and adjacent orgs
- 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 needs
- Lead high-stakes scaling and reliability initiatives, anticipating bottlenecks before they occur and driving systematic improvements from incident postmortems
- Strengthen team capabilities through hands-on mentorship, design reviews, and architectural guidance that accelerate the growth of engineers across the team
Skills
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including hands-on experience building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional platforms
- Demonstrated track record of architecting and delivering fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems at scale, with experience processing billions of dollars in transaction volume
- Led platform-building efforts that transformed fragmented services into coherent, reusable systems (e.g., shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi-tenant architectures)
- Proven experience owning production reliability, leading high-severity incident response, and driving systemic improvements across multiple teams or domains
- History of influencing technical direction across teams and organizations without direct authority, including representing your area in org-level architecture and strategy forums
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality
Benefits
- Equity and bonus eligibility
- Benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k))
Company Overview