Senior Software Engineer, Backend

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 team 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.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Risk Engineering team, you will provide technical leadership for end-to-end projects while driving architectural decisions that shape our risk detection and mitigation systems. You'll manage complex projects from inception to production, mentor junior engineers, and establish technical standards that elevate the entire team's capabilities. Your work will directly impact millions of users and billions in transaction volume.

Technical Leadership & Delivery

• Author, review, and approve technical design documents for complex features and systems
• Provide technical leadership for the delivery of end-to-end projects including implementation, deployment, and monitoring
• Design, scope, and significantly contribute to building new systems and/or major features, applying experience-based judgment
• Manage single or multiple projects end-to-end, regardless of size or complexity
• Lead team rituals including on-call rotations, code reviews, and incident response
• Transform high-level intent and ambiguous business requirements into working architectures

System Architecture & Quality

• Proactively improve code quality and address technical debt across the team's code bases
• Identify, propose, and implement scalable solutions that can be leveraged across the team
• Build systems or features that accelerate the team's ability to deliver high-quality work
• Address almost all high-impact debt and quality problems while maintaining existing systems
• Lead the team's troubleshooting, bug triaging, and performance/scalability improvements
• Ensure solutions are workable for teams inside and outside your function

Mentorship & Knowledge Sharing

• Support, coach, and mentor junior engineers within your team
• Share your knowledge and mastery with others, magnifying the impact of your abilities
• Make other engineers around me more efficient through guidance and best practices
• Take ownership of unowned or undesirable work that enables the team to move faster
• Work with EMs and PMs to champion prioritization

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering with a track record of delivering complex systems
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects and mentor other engineers
• Deep expertise in at least one backend language (Go, Java, Python, Ruby)
• Experience building and scaling distributed systems in production
• Strong understanding of system design, architecture patterns, and trade-offs
• Proven ability to work with ambiguous requirements and drive technical clarity
• Experience leading incident response and conducting post-mortems

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with risk, fraud detection, or financial systems at scale
• Knowledge of machine learning models in production environments
• Experience with real-time event processing and streaming architectures (Kafka, Flink)
• Understanding of payment systems (ACH, cards, crypto) and associated fraud patterns
• Experience with regulatory compliance and security requirements
• Track record of improving team productivity through tooling and process improvements

Technical Skills Backend Engineers Should Have

• Expert-level proficiency in Go, Java, or Python
• Deep understanding of microservices architecture and distributed systems
• Experience with database optimization (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Snowflake)
• Expertise in message queuing and event streaming systems
• Strong understanding of API design, RESTful services, and gRPC