Software Engineer – ML Platform

Block is one company built from many blocks, all united by the same purpose of economic empowerment. The blocks that form our foundational teams — People, Finance, Counsel, Hardware, Information Security, Platform Infrastructure Engineering, and more — provide support and guidance at the corporate level. They work across business groups and around the globe, spanning time zones and disciplines to develop inclusive People policies, forecast finances, give legal counsel, safeguard systems, nurture new initiatives, and more. Every challenge creates possibilities, and we need different perspectives to see them all. Bring yours to Block.

Block’s ML Platform group has one goal: make machine learning at Block easy. Block has over 100 engineers and data scientists building machine learning solutions, and our group’s job is to support these efforts. We build model development tools, feature computation infrastructure, and high scale serving systems to ensure that those trying to use machine learning can spend less time on infrastructure and more time delivering value.

Within that group, the Data Intelligence team provides systems and tools that help teams transform their data into reusable knowledge, so that new ML systems start with access to a large set of observations and features. To accomplish these goals, we own the services that compute real time features used in the decision flows of all payments at Square and the historical data store that allows models to be trained. Our systems have to be tough enough to handle the processing load of all payments at Square, while also being flexible enough to enable data scientists from many teams to do their job.

We sit in a unique spot as a platform team since we are able to work with data scientists, engineers, and product managers from across the organization. We learn directly from our customers and build software that improves their productivity and impact.

We’re looking for engineers to help us continue building out Block’s ML platform.

You will:

1. Build tools and systems that make data scientists happier and more productive
2. Build highly scalable systems that can do the heavy lifting of feature processing
3. Work closely with product, data science, and engineering teams throughout the organization to understand their needs and solve their problems
4. Lead architectural and design discussions, ensuring our platform is performant, fault tolerant, and maintainable
5. Mentor your teammates and assist engineers on other teams who integrate with our platform

1. 5+ years of software engineering experience
2. A desire to solve our customer’s problems by working with them on requirements and solutions
3. Experience designing and deploying large-scale distributed systems built around ML models and big data
4. Knowledge of the process and paint points of ML, and a desire to leverage your engineering expertise to improve Block’s ML platform
5. Experience designing and building flexible large scale data processing systems, ideally with experience in Hadoop, Spark, and Dataflow
6. In-depth experience using product offerings from AWS and GCP, particularly DynamoDB, Lambdas, Bigtable, various containerization technologies, etc.
7. Demonstrated technical initiative and leadership on previous projects, as well as a track record of mentoring junior engineers

Technologies we use:

• Java, Python, GCP, AWS, Snowflake
• Python ML stack (pandas, scikit-learn, Jupyter, etc.)
• MySQL, Redis, Hibernate, jOOQ, Bigtable, React

We’re working to build a more inclusive economy where our customers have equal access to opportunity, and we strive to live by these same values in building our workplace. Block is a proud equal opportunity employer. We work hard to evaluate all employees and job applicants consistently, without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.

We believe in being fair, and are committed to an inclusive interview experience, including providing reasonable accommodations to disabled applicants throughout the recruitment process. We encourage applicants to share any needed accommodations with their recruiter, who will treat these requests as confidentially as possible. Want to learn more about what we’re doing to build a workplace that is fair and square? Check out our I+D page. 

Additionally, we consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, and always assess candidates on an individualized basis.

Perks

We want you to be well and thrive. Our global benefits package includes:

• Healthcare coverage
• Retirement Plans
• Employee Stock Purchase Program
• Wellness perks
• Paid parental leave
• Paid time off
• Learning and Development resources

Block, Inc. (NYSE: SQ) is a global technology company with a focus on financial services. Made up of Square, Cash App, Spiral, TIDAL, and TBD54566975, we build tools to help more people access the economy. Square helps sellers run and grow their businesses with its integrated ecosystem of commerce solutions, business software, and banking services. With Cash App, anyone can easily send, spend, or invest their money in stocks or Bitcoin. Spiral (formerly Square Crypto) builds and funds free, open-source Bitcoin projects. Artists use TIDAL to help them succeed as entrepreneurs and connect more deeply with fans. TBD54566975 is building an open developer platform to make it easier to access Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies without having to go through an institution.