# Staff Software Engineer, Payments

**Company:** [Coinbase](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/coinbase)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $218k – $257k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Distributed Systems, Payment Systems, Financial Infrastructure, High-Volume Transactional Platforms, Fault-Tolerant Systems, System Architecture, Incident Response, Production Reliability, Observability, SLOs
**Posted:** 2026-06-10

> Staff Software Engineer on the Payments team building and scaling the infrastructure, workflows, and APIs that power global fiat on- and off-ramps. Owns multi-year technical strategy, distributed systems architecture, and cross-team reliability initiatives.

## Job Description

## What you'll do

- Own the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for the Payments platform, defining the roadmap for scaling integrations, routing, and funds-flow systems across global markets.
- Build and evolve distributed systems that process high-volume payment traffic, designing for fault isolation, graceful degradation, observability, and clear SLOs for Tier-0/Tier-1 services.
- Drive engineering quality by establishing paved roads, shared frameworks, and coding standards that elevate the technical bar across the Payments team and adjacent orgs.
- 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 needs.
- Lead high-stakes scaling and reliability initiatives, anticipating bottlenecks before they occur and driving systematic improvements from incident postmortems.
- Strengthen team capabilities through hands-on mentorship, design reviews, and architectural guidance that accelerate the growth of engineers across the team.

## Required Skills and Experience

- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including hands-on experience building payment systems, financial infrastructure, or high-volume transactional platforms.
- Demonstrated track record of architecting and delivering fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems at scale, with experience processing billions of dollars in transaction volume.
- Led platform-building efforts that transformed fragmented services into coherent, reusable systems (e.g., shared frameworks, unified APIs, multi-tenant architectures).
- Proven experience owning production reliability, leading high-severity incident response, and driving systemic improvements across multiple teams or domains.
- History of influencing technical direction across teams and organizations without direct authority, including representing your area in org-level architecture and strategy forums.
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.

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