Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Platform (FinHub - Transfer)
Job Description
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.
We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join the FinHub Transfers team within the Platform organization. Transfers is the nerve center of crypto and fiat fund movements at Coinbase, orchestrating routing and settlement across Retail, Prime, Exchange, International, and Payments product groups through one of the most scalable distributed financial systems in the world. You'll own the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for this infrastructure, drive execution on complex cross-team initiatives, and elevate engineering quality across the team while maintaining high-volume individual output.
What you'll do:
- Own the technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for the Transfers platform, making key design decisions on fund movement orchestration, routing, and reliability across crypto and fiat rails.
- Drive cross-team initiatives spanning multiple product groups (Retail, Prime, Exchange, Payments, International), building alignment with stakeholders and turning ambiguous requirements into scoped technical plans.
- Build and scale high-throughput, fault-tolerant distributed systems that process billions of dollars in daily transaction volume with the correctness and auditability standards of financial infrastructure.
- Lead the evolution of engineering processes, quality standards, and architectural patterns across the team, raising the bar through design reviews and hands-on mentorship.
- Partner with Product, Finance, Risk, and Compliance to translate business and regulatory requirements into platform capabilities that unlock new fund movement corridors and product launches.
Required Skills and Experience:
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with a track record of designing and building fault-tolerant, highly reliable distributed systems at scale.
- Demonstrated ownership of technical strategy and roadmap for a platform or service area, including making architectural trade-offs with significant organizational impact.
- Proven experience architecting solutions to ambiguous, cross-team problems, driving alignment across engineering and non-engineering stakeholders to deliver results.
- Deep experience with ledgering, transfers, payments, or trading systems that process high-precision financial transactions at scale.
- Track record of elevating team technical quality through mentorship, design reviews, and engineering process improvements.
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.
Pay Transparency Notice: Base salary varies by location (see range below). Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)).
- Application Limit: Candidates may submit a maximum of 3 applications within a 6-month period.
- Equal Opportunity Employer: Coinbase is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or genetic information. Applicants with criminal histories will be considered consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws.
How to Stand Out
- To increase your chances of success, focus on showcasing expertise in building scalable and secure backend systems, as Coinbase's FinHub - Transfer platform requires robust engineering to handle high-volume financial transactions.
- Develop a strong understanding of blockchain technology and its applications in finance, as Coinbase is a leading cryptocurrency exchange and expects its engineers to be well-versed in the underlying technology.
- Create a portfolio that demonstrates your ability to design and implement efficient data models, APIs, and microservices, as these are critical components of Coinbase's platform, and be prepared to explain your design decisions and trade-offs during the interview process.
- Prepare to discuss your experience with agile development methodologies and collaborative version control systems like Git, as Coinbase emphasizes rapid iteration and continuous improvement in its engineering teams.
- Be ready to provide specific examples of how you've optimized the performance and reliability of backend systems in previous roles, as Coinbase's platform requires engineers who can balance scalability, security, and usability.
- Research Coinbase's technology stack and be prepared to ask informed questions about the company's architecture and technical vision during the interview, as this demonstrates your interest in the company's specific challenges and opportunities.
This is a remote position listed on WFA Digital, the platform for professionals who work from anywhere. Browse more remote jobs across all categories.