Staff Software Engineer (Platform - Identity IDV)

Role Overview

Coinbase is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to own the multi-year technical vision and architecture for the identity verification (IDV) platform within Platform. This platform powers the decision engine, vendor orchestration, and infrastructure that determines whether an identity is genuine at global scale—processing approximately 700K verifications per month across Retail, Prime, and Institutional business lines.

Coinbase is a remote-first company with quarterly in-person working sessions called "surges."

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end architecture and technical direction for Coinbase's IDV platform, including the decision engine, vendor orchestration layer, and verification infrastructure.
• 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.
• Drive cross-team technical strategy and set abstractions, APIs, and platform patterns across multiple Identity pods.

Requirements

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience deploying and operating large-scale production systems in regulated or fintech environments.
• Proven technical leadership owning end-to-end design and delivery of complex backend systems (architecture, system design, API/data-model design, production rollout).
• Deep distributed systems expertise in 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.
• Domain experience in identity, KYC, fraud infrastructure, vendor orchestration, or payments.
• Ability to utilize generative AI responsibly to drive workflow efficiency, cost, and quality improvements.

Application Rules

• Maximum of 3 applications within a 6-month period.
• Accommodations can be requested at accommodations[at]coinbase.com.