Description
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-calibre colleagues, and who actively seeks feedback to keep levelling 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.
We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to lead the Identity Accounts team , the platform foundation that powers every user, organisation, and account at Coinbase. This is one of the most visible and business-critical engineering platforms at the company: your team’s services handle authentication, authorisation, security settings, and account management for millions of customers across every Coinbase product.
You'll be the lead across three sub-teams (Foundations, Users Platformisation, and Settings & Account Management), drive roadmap execution in close partnership with your Engineering and Product Manager, and represent the team to 20+ internal product groups and key partners in Security, Risk, Compliance, and Design. If you thrive at the intersection of deep technical problems and cross-functional leadership, this role is for you.
What you’ll be doing:
Drive roadmap execution across three focused sub-teams: Foundations (authorisation infrastructure), Users Platformisation (decomposing the legacy monolith), and Settings & Account Management (Security Settings 2.0, account navigation redesign).
Own reliability and operational excellence for 8+ mission-critical Tier-0/Tier-1 services , maintaining 99.99% uptime, championing engineering quality, and acting as quarterback during high-severity incidents.
Represent the team to internal product groups and key partners in Security, Risk, Compliance, and Design , building alignment and ensuring seamless integration support.
Partner with Product and your EM to define strategic roadmaps, prioritise initiatives, and translate complex constraints into simple, scalable platform solutions.
Champion engineering excellence , drive code and design reviews, set engineering standards, and build every capability to be composable and reusable across product lines (no bespoke, one-off integrations).
Accelerate internal customers by reducing new product team onboarding time to under 2 weeks and delivering excellent APIs, clear documentation, and strong integration support.
What we look for in you:
8+ years of software engineering experience
Demonstrated track record of architecting and delivering systems at scale , high-throughput, high-availability services serving millions of requests in production
Proven experience leading AI/LLM product development , building AI agents, code generation systems, or developer-facing AI tooling in production environments
Strong command of Go, gRPC, Kubernetes, and service mesh architectures
Ability to drive technical clarity in ambiguous, high-stakes situations , you can take a vague problem (“compliance teams can’t self-serve”), define the right solution space, and execute it to completion
A history of influencing across organisational boundaries , getting buy-in from sceptical stakeholders, aligning competing priorities, and building durable cross-team partnerships
Excellent written and verbal communication , you produce technical design documents that build organisational confidence and create shared understanding
Based in or able to commute to NYC or SF, with willingness to work from the tech hub once or twice a week or on an as-needed basis for architecture reviews, stakeholder meetings, and team offsites
Nice to haves:
Experience in identity, authentication, authorisation, or account management systems.
Prior experience leading a Platform team or similar domain with high internal customer dependency.
Familiarity with our stack: Go, gRPC, React, SpiceDB, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Datadog.
Background building financial, high-reliability, or security systems.