About the company
Coinbase is 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.”
Responsibilities
- 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.
Requirements
- 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.
Conditions
- Annual base salary range: $260,100 — $260,100 USD. Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility, and benefits.