Senior Software Engineer, Backend (risk Platform)

Senior Software Engineer

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.

The Role

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.

What You'll Be Doing

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

What We Look For In You

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