Senior Staff Software Engineer, Payments
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As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Payments Platform team within the Platform group, you'll define the engineering vision for how fiat moves into and out of Coinbase across 50+ countries and payment rails. Payments Platform is the bridge between the traditional financial world and the crypto economy, building the on- and off-ramps that power reliable, seamless payment processing at global scale. You'll shape architectural cohesion across rails, orchestration, and funds-flow systems while driving platform-level reliability, cost efficiency, and readiness for significant volume growth.
What you'll do:
- Own the multi-quarter technical strategy for Payments spanning rails integrations, orchestration, routing, and funds-flow services to support new products, geographies, and significant growth in payment volume.
- Architect the core Payments platform for high availability, low latency, and cost efficiency at global scale, enforcing technical standards for financial correctness including idempotency, reconciliation, failure-mode handling, and auditability across all money-movement paths.
- Lead end-to-end design and rollout of large cross-team initiatives (e.g., new global rails, platform decompositions, resiliency programs), breaking high ambiguity into clear milestones and measurable outcomes.
- Partner with FinHub, Payments Risk, Regulatory Platform, and Product to design cohesive architectures that balance customer experience, risk controls, compliance, and unit economics.
- Drive systematic reliability and efficiency improvements using observability signals (success rates, latency, cost, incident patterns) to identify and resolve structural platform gaps.
- Represent Payments in executive and cross-org forums, communicating tradeoffs clearly, aligning stakeholders on strategy, and mentoring senior/staff engineers across pods on system design quality and long-term maintainability.
Required Skills and Experience:
- 12+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production, with deep money-movement architecture experience (PSPs, ISO 20022, routing, double-entry, high-volume payment systems).
- Deep expertise in backend programming (e.g., Go, Python, Java) and cloud-native architecture, with a proven track record designing highly available, high-performance financial systems.
- Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional technical initiatives spanning multiple teams, anticipate scaling bottlenecks proactively, and drive systematic platform improvements.
- Experience with ledgering, reconciliation, or settlement systems at scale, with strong financial acumen for handling accounting data and transactions with high precision.
- Proven ability to distill complex technical concepts into clear, actionable solutions for both engineering and executive audiences.
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.
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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)).
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