Senior Staff Software Engineer, Platform - IAM
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About this role
Ready to do the most impactful work of your career? At Coinbase, we are uncompromising on our mission to increase economic freedom. The bar is high, the environment is intense, and we like it that way. This isn't a place for complacency, it’s a place to be pushed past your perceived limits. If you're ready to build the future of finance alongside people who refuse to settle for "good enough," you belong here. Coinbase is a remote-first, but not remote-only company. Expect to get together quarterly for intense in-person working sessions called “surges.” learn more about working at Coinbase.
We're hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer (Uber Tech Lead) for Identity & Access Management within Platform and own the technical strategy that unifies human, AI agent, service, and workload identity into one coherent platform. IAM is a distributed problem across 700+ internal systems that no central team can implement alone, so this platform must make access consistent, visible, provable, and efficient across every identity type. You'll set architecture across multiple pods, drive adoption with hundreds of engineering teams, and act as one of the most senior technical voices for identity and access management at Coinbase.
What you'll do:
- Own the multi-year technical strategy for IAM end to end, including the architecture that unifies workforce, AI agent, and service/workload identity under a common model with shared primitives for authentication, authorization, provisioning, and governance.
- Drive architecture decisions across multiple pods and teams you don't manage - establishing the standards, review bars, and integration contracts the rest of engineering builds against.
- Build the adoption strategy for 700+ systems, including sequencing, migration paths, and build-vs-buy decisions that determine what we own versus integrate.
- Partner with Security, Compliance, IT, Infrastructure, and product engineering leadership to translate audit and regulatory requirements (UAR, SOX, SOC 2) into automated controls and self-generating evidence.
- Lead the data model and tooling that answer "who has access to what, and why" across a heterogeneous estate, reducing standing privilege while making the secure path the fast path.
- Grow the technical bench by mentoring staff and senior engineers and raising the org's depth in identity as a domain.
Required Skills and Experience:
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, including a track record as the most senior technical leader on a platform spanning multiple teams with multi-year architecture driven to adoption across dozens of consuming teams.
- Deep IAM expertise across more than one domain (workforce identity, authorization, access lifecycle, or non-human identity) with substantive experience in service or workload identity - service-to-service auth, workload identity federation, or machine credential management at scale.
- Production Go experience and distributed systems design on AWS, with fluency in identity protocols and standards (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, and workload identity patterns).
- Proven influence without authority at senior levels - you've changed the technical direction of teams and orgs outside your own and secured leadership alignment on ambiguous, org-wide access-risk problems.
- Ability to translate audit and regulatory requirements into automated technical controls, with clear written and verbal communication that frames complex identity problems for executive audiences.
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.
Pay Transparency Notice: Base salary varies by location (see range below). Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)).
- Application Limit: Candidates may submit a maximum of 3 applications within a 6-month period.
- Equal Opportunity Employer: Coinbase is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or genetic information. Applicants with criminal histories will be considered consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws.
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- Accommodations: If you are an individual with a disability who needs a reasonable accommodation, email us your request and contact info at accommodations[at]coinbase.com. Need screen reading technology? Click here to download a free compatible screen reader and view the tutorial.
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