Software Engineer, Backend - Platform; Rails

Ready to be pushed beyond what you think you’re capable of?

At Coinbase, our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world. It’s a massive, ambitious opportunity that demands the best of us, every day, as we build the emerging onchain platform — and with it, the future global financial system.

To achieve our mission, we’re seeking a very specific candidate. We want someone who is passionate about our mission and who believes in the power of crypto and blockchain technology to update the financial system. We want someone who is eager to leave their mark on the world, who relishes the pressure and privilege of working with high caliber colleagues, and who actively seeks feedback to keep leveling up.

We want someone who will run towards, not away from, solving the company’s hardest problems.

While many roles at Coinbase are remote-first, we are not remote-only. In‑person participation is required throughout the year. Team and company‑wide offsites are held multiple times annually to foster collaboration, connection, and alignment. Attendance is expected and fully supported.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Payment Rails team within Coinbase’s Platform organization. Payment Rails is the foundational infrastructure that powers every fiat and crypto money movement at Coinbase—processing billions of dollars in transaction volume across payment methods, gateways, and settlement systems. In this role, you’ll own the architecture and technical direction of our payment rails infrastructure, designing fault‑tolerant, high‑reliability systems that enable seamless transfers at global scale while maintaining the safety and compliance standards our customers depend on.

• Own the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for Payment Rails—designing APIs, orchestration layers, and integrations that consolidate fragmented payment flows into a cohesive, multi‑tenant platform other teams can build on.
• Build and scale complex distributed systems that process high‑volume, high‑reliability payment traffic—designing for fault isolation, graceful degradation, strong observability, and clear SLOs for Tier‑0/Tier‑1 services.
• Drive an AI‑first approach to engineering workflows—identify where AI‑powered tools can accelerate development, improve code quality, and enhance operational efficiency across the team and broader engineering org.
• 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 requirements.
• Lead high‑stakes scaling initiatives and define the technical direction for how Coinbase moves money—anticipating bottlenecks before they occur and driving proactive, systematic improvements.
• Raise the engineering bar across Payment Rails and adjacent orgs by establishing paved roads, design patterns, and best practices that elevate team technical quality through mentorship, design reviews, and process improvements.
• Mentor and train other team members on design techniques and coding standards.

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering.
• Experience building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high‑volume transactional systems.
• You’ve designed and built fault‑tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems at scale—with a demonstrable track record of architecting systems that handle billions of dollars in transaction volume.
• Platform‑builder mindset: you’ve led efforts to turn fragmented services and bespoke integrations into coherent, reusable platforms (e.g., shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi‑tenant architectures).
• Strong operational excellence: experience owning production reliability, leading high‑severity incident response, and driving systemic improvements from postmortems across multiple teams or domains.
• Collaborative leadership: history of influencing across teams and organizations without direct authority, driving consensus on high‑impact technical decisions, and representing your area in org‑level forums.
• Demonstrates the ability to responsibly use…