Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Consumer- Retail Cash)
$218k - $218k USD
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.
Our work culture is intense and isn’t for everyone. But if you want to build the future alongside others who excel in their disciplines and expect the same from you, there’s no better place to be.
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.
The Retail Cash team provides the foundational cash layer for Coinbase’s Consumer business. We make it possible for users to reliably hold, fund, withdraw, and route cash to every experience across Coinbase—from simple buys and sells to advanced trading and new Consumer products. Our systems must be highly reliable, auditable, and globally scalable.
As a Staff Engineer, you will be the technical anchor for Cash services. You will define the architecture and roadmap for core cash capabilities, ensuring that any team at Coinbase can depend on a robust, secure, and always‑on cash foundation.You will be part of the vision to build a compelling and trusted single cash balance that serves Everything Exchange users’ risk‑off needs.
This role is for an engineer who thrives on tackling complex, high-impact distributed systems that require high reliability and performance—especially in a trading and financial technology context.
What you’ll be doing:
- Serve as the technical leader and strategist for the Consumer Cash team, defining multi-quarter technical strategies that intersect multiple financial products.
- Architect, develop, and own distributed systems that power low-latency APIs and event‑driven pipelines that process large volumes of cash transactions with strong correctness guarantees.
- Provide technical structure and partner closely with management and stakeholders to translate business goals into a defined strategic roadmap.
- Design and implement foundational, high-performance infrastructure components, leveraging tools like Kafka and Clickhouse in an event-sourced architecture.
- Manage individual project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables with strong technical expertise.
- Mentor and coach other team members on advanced design techniques, coding standards, and best practices for building robust value-add products.
- Leverage our modern, diverse tech stack to write high-quality, production-ready code that is thoroughly tested and delivers a critical product to market.
What we look for in you:
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with significant experience architecting and developing solutions to ambiguous, high-impact problems.
- Demonstrated experience with low-latency, event-driven, or distributed systems.
- A strong signal if you have a background in building consumer facing trading products or any application that handles large amounts of streaming data.
- Passion for building an open financial system that brings the world together.
- Intellectual curiosity, openness, and a passion for building a culture of positive energy and blameless truth-seeking.
Nice to haves:
- Experience in payments, banking, wallets, or trading systems, especially transaction processing or ledgering.
- Familiarity with the tech stack, including Golang, Clickhouse, Kafka, Redis, MongoDB.
- Experience building financial, high reliability, or security systems.
- Background in Blockchains (such as Bitcoin, Ethereum) or crypto-forward experience (e.g., interacting with Ethereum addresses, ENS, dApps).
- Experience with a company going through rapid growth (from 10 to 100s of engineers).
Job #: 75913
Pay Transparency Notice: The target annual base salary for this position can range as detailed below. Total compensation mayalso include equity and bonus eligibility and benefits (including medical, dental, and vision).
Annual base salary range (excluding equity and bonus):
$217,900—$217,900 CAD
Please be advised that each candidate may submit a maximum of four applications within any 30-day period. We encourage you to carefully evaluate how your skills and interests align with Coinbase's roles before applying.
Commitment to Equal Opportunity
Coinbase is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation or any other basis protected by applicable law. Coinbase will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. For US applicants, you may view the Employee Rights and the Know Your Rights notices by clicking on their corresponding links. Additionally, Coinbase participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law.
Coinbase is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation because of a disability for any part of the employment process, please contact us at accommodations[at]coinbase.com to let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. For quick access to screen reading technology compatible with this site click here to download a free compatible screen reader (free step by step tutorial can be found here).
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Depending on your location, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) may regulate the way we manage the data of job applicants. Our full notice outlining how data will be processed as part of the application procedure for applicable locations is available here. By submitting your application, you are agreeing to our use and processing of your data as required. For US applicants only, by submitting your application you are agreeing to arbitration of disputes as outlined here.
AI Disclosure
For select roles, Coinbase is piloting an AI tool based on machine learning technologies to conduct initial screening interviews to qualified applicants. The tool simulates realistic interview scenarios and engages in dynamic conversation. A human recruiter will review your interview responses, provided in the form of a voice recording and/or transcript, to assess them against the qualifications and characteristics outlined in the job description.
For select roles, Coinbase is also piloting an AI interview intelligence platform to transcribe and summarize interview notes, allowing our interviewers to fully focus on you as the candidate.
The above pilots are for testing purposes and Coinbase will not use AI to make decisions impacting employment. To request a reasonable accommodation due to disability, please contact accommodations[at]coinbase.com