Engineering Manager (Platform - Identity)

About the role

This Engineering Manager role at Coinbase focuses on leading the Identity Accounts team, which is responsible for the foundational platform handling user authentication, authorization, security settings, and account management. This platform is central to every Coinbase product and serves millions of customers. The position requires overseeing multiple sub-teams focused on authorization infrastructure, platform modernization, and account settings, ensuring these critical services maintain very high uptime.

The manager will be responsible for both team leadership and technical oversight. This includes hiring, coaching, and developing engineers across backend, frontend, and site reliability disciplines. They will also drive the execution of the team's roadmap, ensuring that strategic initiatives are prioritized and delivered. A key aspect of the role is maintaining operational excellence for over eight mission-critical services, acting as a lead during high-severity incidents.

Success in this role involves building a high-performing team capable of delivering scalable platform solutions. The manager will partner with product and tech leads to define strategy, champion engineering quality through code and design reviews, and ensure all capabilities are reusable across product lines. Accelerating internal customer onboarding and providing excellent API support and documentation are also critical measures of success.

The annual base salary for this role ranges from $218,025 to $256,500 USD, excluding potential equity and bonus eligibility.

Skills that matter here

• Go: Familiarity with Go is beneficial as it is part of the team's technology stack for backend services.
• Kubernetes: Experience with Kubernetes is a plus, indicating the infrastructure environment used for deploying services.
• PostgreSQL: Knowledge of PostgreSQL is helpful, as it is used for data storage within the platform.
• Kafka: Familiarity with Kafka suggests the use of distributed streaming platforms for data pipelines or event handling.
• React: Experience with React is a nice-to-have, indicating frontend components are part of the team's scope.
• SpiceDB: Familiarity with SpiceDB is beneficial, suggesting its use for authorization infrastructure.

Who this role suits

• An experienced engineering leader with at least two years of management experience overseeing teams of five or more engineers.
• Someone with a strong technical background in distributed systems, API architecture, and reliability, comfortable being hands-on when necessary.
• A clear and effective communicator who can build alignment across different organizational groups and represent their team to senior leadership.
• A manager focused on building and scaling high-performing teams through talent development, and who champions engineering quality and reusability.

From the employer

What you'll be doing:

• Lead and grow a team of engineers across backend, frontend, and site reliability — building a high-performing team through hiring, coaching, and career development.
• Drive roadmap execution across three focused sub-teams: Foundations (authorization infrastructure), Users Platformization (decomposing the legacy monolith), and Settings & Account Management (Security Settings 2.0, account navigation redesign).
• Own reliability and operational excellence for 8+ mission-critical Tier-0/Tier-1 services — maintaining 99.99% uptime, championing engineering quality, and acting as quarterback during high-severity incidents.
• Represent the team to internal product groups and key partners in Security, Risk, Compliance, and Design — building alignment and ensuring seamless integration support.
• Partner with Product and your Tech Lead to define strategic roadmaps, prioritize initiatives, and translate complex constraints into simple, scalable platform solutions.
• Champion engineering excellence — drive code and design reviews, set engineering standards, and build every capability to be composable and reusable across product lines (no bespoke, one-off integrations).
• Accelerate internal customers by reducing new product team onboarding time to under 2 weeks and delivering excellent APIs, clear documentation, and strong integration support.

What we look for in you:

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 2 years of engineering management experience leading teams of 5+ engineers.
• Proven track record shipping large-scale distributed systems serving millions of users in production.
• Technical fluency in coding, system design, API architecture, and reliability tradeoffs — able to be hands-on when needed (writing/reviewing code, leading incidents, triaging bugs).
• Strong communicator who writes clearly, builds organizational alignment, and can represent the team effectively to senior leadership and cross-functional partners.
• Experience building and scaling high-performing engineering teams through hiring, developing, and promoting talent.
• Demonstrates the ability to responsibly use generative AI tools and copilots (e.g., LibreChat, Gemini, Glean) in daily workflows, continuously learn as tools evolve, and apply human-in-the-loop practices to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in efficiency, cost, and quality.

Nice to haves:

• Experience in identity, authentication, authorization, or account management systems.
• Prior experience leading a Platform team or similar domain with high internal customer dependency.
• Familiarity with our stack: Go, gRPC, React, SpiceDB, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Datadog.
• Background building financial, high-reliability, or security systems.

What we offer:

• Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility and benefits (including medical, dental, vision and 401(k)).
• Annual base salary range (excluding equity and bonus): $218,025 - $256,500 USD.