Senior Staff Software Engineer, Payments

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