Senior Staff Software Engineer, Payments

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 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 an