Staff Software Engineer (Platform - Identity IDV)

Overview

Own the multi-year technical vision and architecture for Coinbase's identity verification (IDV) platform within Platform, which powers the decision engine, vendor orchestration, and verification infrastructure that determines whether an identity is genuine at global scale.

What you'll do

• Own end-to-end architecture and technical direction for Coinbase's IDV platform, including the decision engine, vendor orchestration layer, and verification infrastructure that all business lines depend on.
• Lead platform consolidation by migrating all IDV onto a single decision-engine-driven platform, retiring 100+ legacy rules and fragmented paths, and eliminating single-vendor points of failure.
• Design and build vendor-agnostic orchestration with automated, real-time routing and failover that selects the optimal vendor per request and dynamically balances fraud prevention (FAR) against user access (FRR/SCR).
• Scale the platform to support every new product, region, and verification modality (document, biometric, liveness) with self-serve configuration so any Coinbase team integrates IDV without a dependency request.
• Drive cross-team technical strategy and set the abstractions, APIs, and platform patterns that the broader Identity org builds on, influencing at the Staff level across multiple pods.

What you'll need

• 8+ years of backend software engineering with a track record of deploying and operating large-scale production systems in regulated or fintech environments.
• Proven technical leadership owning end-to-end design and delivery of complex, cross-team backend systems, including system design, architecture, API/data-model design, and production rollout.
• Deep distributed-systems expertise spanning scalability, reliability, API design, and high availability for Tier-0 services.
• Expert-level coding in Go (or equivalent systems language) with hands-on experience in gRPC/microservices, AWS, and Kubernetes.
• Experience in identity, KYC, fraud infrastructure, vendor orchestration, or payments domains with the ability to turn ambiguous compliance and platform problems into actionable technical roadmaps.
• 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): $218,025 to $256,500 USD.
• Total compensation may include equity, bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)).