Senior Software Engineer - Access & Authorization (Platform)

Overview

Senior Software Engineer on the Access & Authorization team within the Platform group, building and operating the systems customers use to securely access Coinbase, at the intersection of security, identity, developer infrastructure, and customer experience.

What you'll do

• Own end-to-end design, implementation, and operation of capabilities across authentication, OAuth, sessions, tokens, 2FA, account recovery, and edge authorization.
• Build secure, low-latency Go and gRPC services used across Coinbase's web, mobile, API, and partner experiences, with strong observability, failure testing, and measurable SLOs.
• Lead technical designs for complex initiatives such as signed authorization tokens, passkeys, biometric recovery, device-aware authentication, and mobile OAuth.
• Partner with product, security, fraud, and infrastructure teams to balance customer conversion, account protection, regulatory requirements, and engineering constraints.
• Simplify integration patterns and build self-service tooling that enables product teams to adopt access and authorization capabilities safely at scale.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through design reviews, pairing, code reviews, and on-call participation.

What you'll need

• 5+ years of backend software engineering experience.
• Strong proficiency in Go or a comparable systems-oriented language.
• Experience building and operating reliable, high-throughput distributed services in production.
• Demonstrated experience designing secure APIs and reasoning about authentication, authorization, session management, trust boundaries, and token handling (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWTs, PKCE, or related standards).
• Proficiency with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and data stores such as Redis or DynamoDB.
• Strong operational instincts using metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and SLOs to run critical services.
• Track record of delivering complex, cross-functional projects from technical design through production rollout, with clear written and verbal communication that aligns engineering, security, product, and infrastructure partners.
• Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.

Details

• Location: Remote - USA.
• Remote-first, but not remote-only: expect to get together quarterly for in-person working sessions called "surges."
• Annual base salary range (excluding equity and bonus): $186,065 to $218,900 USD. Total compensation may include equity, bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)).
• Candidates may submit a maximum of 3 applications within a 6-month period.