Senior Staff Software Engineer, Payments

Coinbase

Senior Staff Software Engineer leading the technical strategy for Coinbase's Payments platform. Architecting solutions for seamless payment processing in the global crypto economy.

Posted 6/8/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $253,895 - $298,700 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

CloudDistributed SystemsGoJavaPythonRuby on Rails

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

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 high 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 closely 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/staff engineers across Payments pods, upleveling system design quality, review rigor, and long‑term maintainability.
Use data and observability signals (e.g., success rates, latency, cost, incident patterns) to identify structural platform gaps and lead systematic reliability and efficiency improvements.
Represent Payments in executive and cross‑org forums, clearly communicating tradeoffs, aligning stakeholders on strategy, and securing buy‑in for high‑impact technical bets.

Requirements

What you’ll need

10+ years building and operating large‑scale distributed systems in production.
Deep money‑movement architecture experience (PSPs, ISO 20022, routing, double‑entry, high‑volume payment systems)
Deep expertise in backend programming (e.g., Python, Go, Java) and cloud‑native architecture.
Proven track record designing highly available, high‑performance systems.
Ability to anticipate scaling bottlenecks before they occur and take decisive, proactive measures.
Experience leading cross‑functional technical initiatives and mentoring senior engineers.
Commitment to technical excellence, sharing best practices, and fostering a strong engineering culture.
Ability to distill complex technical concepts into clear and actionable solutions.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility
medical, dental, vision, 401(k)

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

PythonGoJavacloud-native architecturedistributed systemsmoney-movement architecturehigh-availability systemshigh-performance systemsscalabilitytechnical standards

Soft Skills

mentorshipcommunicationleadershipproblem-solvingcollaborationtechnical excellencebest practicesengineering culturestrategic thinkingstakeholder alignment