Staff Software Engineer (Platform
Job description
About the role
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.
Senior Software Engineer, Access & Authorization
As a Staff Software Engineer on the Access & Authorization team within the Platform group, you'll help shape the systems customers use to securely access Coinbase. This team builds and operates distributed services at the intersection of security, identity, developer infrastructure, and customer experience. You'll design foundational authentication and authorization capabilities that balance strong security with a simple experience, creating leverage across every Coinbase product and partner integration.
Own end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of capabilities across authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, account recovery, and edge authorization.
Build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services used across Coinbase's web, mobile, API, and partner experiences, with strong observability, failure testing, and measurable SLOs.
Lead technical designs for complex initiatives such as signed authorization tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth.
Partner with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to balance customer conversion, account protection, regulatory requirements, and engineering constraints.
Simplify integration patterns and build self-service tooling that enables product teams to adopt access and authorization capabilities safely at scale.
Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through design reviews, pairing, code reviews, and on-call participation.
Design and implement authorization models and policy engines that enforce least-privilege access across internal tools and customer workflows.
Investigate and prototype emerging security standards and protocols to future-proof platform capabilities and align with industry best practices.
8+ years of backend software engineering experience with strong proficiency in Go or a comparable systems-oriented language, including building and operating reliable, high-throughput distributed services in production.
Demonstrated experience designing secure APIs and reasoning about authentication, authorization, session management, trust boundaries, and token handling (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE, or related standards).
Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores such as Redis or DynamoDB, with strong operational instincts using metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and SLOs to run critical services.
Track record of delivering complex, cross-functional projects from technical design through production rollout, with clear written and verbal communication that aligns engineering, security, product, and infrastructure partners.
Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.
Experience with identity providers, directory services, and federation protocols such as SAML and OIDC in large-scale environments.
Strong understanding of cryptographic primitives, key management, and secure storage mechanisms for credentials and secrets.
Ability to troubleshoot production incidents under pressure, conducting postmortems and implementing preventative controls to reduce future risk.
Experience with FIDO2 and WebAuthn for passwordless authentication flows.
Contributions to open source security projects or public GitHub repositories demonstrating deep systems work.
Familiarity with financial services regulatory environments such as FinCEN, OFAC, or crypto-specific compliance requirements.
Experience building threat models and conducting security design reviews for distributed systems.
Quarterly in-person "surges" are expected.
Remote-first role based in the USA.
Employment eligibility verification required at hire.
About Coinbase
Coinbase is hiring for Staff Software Engineer (Platform. The listing location is Remote
USA.
This Staff Software Engineer (Platform opening is posted for Remote
USA.