Senior Staff Software Engineer, Onboarding

📋 Description

• • As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Identity team within Coinbase's Platform Product Group, you will be instrumental in shaping the future of economic freedom by building the trusted, scalable, and compliant foundations that power multiple Coinbase products.
• • You will take ownership of the Onboarding & KYC platform end-to-end, serving as the primary technical authority for this critical domain. This includes understanding and influencing how onboarding and identity signals integrate seamlessly with adjacent products, services, and data platforms across the entire Coinbase ecosystem.
• • Your core responsibility will be to architect the next generation of our onboarding platform. This involves leading a multi-quarter initiative to modernize legacy systems, transitioning them into a robust, geo-specific architecture designed for global scalability and adaptability to evolving compliance requirements.
• • You will be responsible for setting the technical vision and defining high-level technical standards for the onboarding domain. This includes driving domain abstraction, establishing the target architecture, and strategically expanding the platform's capabilities beyond basic KYC to serve as a comprehensive onboarding foundation capable of supporting a wide array of new product offerings and innovative use cases.
• • A significant aspect of your role will be to drive reliability and ensure a zero-downtime evolution of the platform. You will design systems with a focus on high availability, operational integrity, and implementing safe migration strategies to guarantee that critical identity flows remain resilient and uninterrupted during modernization efforts.
• • You will play a key role in improving the customer experience by thoughtfully designing the platform. This means optimizing for user conversion, ensuring data correctness, and maintaining consistency across different regions, all while upholding stringent compliance controls to reduce onboarding friction.
• • Beyond the immediate roadmap, you will be encouraged to innovate and explore future-forward directions. This includes investigating and prototyping concepts such as Agentic Onboarding (AI-driven processes) and On-Chain KYC, assessing how emerging AI capabilities can reshape identity systems, and defining what constitutes an “AI-proof” identity platform for the future.
• • You will provide crucial cultural and technical leadership within the engineering team. This involves mentoring Staff engineers, actively raising the bar for engineering and operational excellence across the team, and introducing new technical paradigms and best practices to foster continuous improvement.
• • Effective cross-functional influence will be essential. You will partner closely with Product, Design, Compliance, Legal, and other engineering organizations to ensure alignment on requirements, navigate complex tradeoffs, and sequence high-stakes initiatives effectively.
• • This role demands a deep understanding of distributed systems, service boundaries, reliability engineering, observability, and operational rigor, ensuring the platform is not only functional but also robust and maintainable.
• • You will leverage your strong system design and coding abilities to build and operate high-availability, high-correctness services, demonstrating a proven track record in managing complex, mission-critical platforms.
• • Your experience in migrating legacy systems to modern architectures with minimal or zero downtime will be critical in the platform modernization efforts.
• • You will utilize your strong written and verbal communication skills to drive alignment and consensus among senior stakeholders, articulating complex technical concepts clearly and persuasively.
• • Leading large, ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives and owning their outcomes from inception to completion is a core expectation of this position.
• • Mentoring and elevating senior engineers through direct, actionable feedback will be a key part of your leadership responsibilities, contributing to the growth and development of the engineering team.
• • The role offers a unique opportunity to be at the forefront of building the next generation of identity and onboarding systems in the rapidly evolving crypto economy, directly impacting user trust and platform growth.