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.

The Role

The Data Enablement team builds the platforms and frameworks that move and serve data across Block. We support four core capabilities — online and offline data projections, a third-party data proxy, and graph data stores — for customers across the company, including Risk, Compliance, Data Engineering, and Data Science. As a Staff Software Engineer on the team, you will become the subject-matter expert and a significant contributor to our online data projections and event-streaming capabilities — designing the platform, frameworks, and standards that turn Block's event streams into low-latency, production-grade data products. Your work sets the technical direction for how teams across the company build on streaming data. 

You Will

• Become the subject-matter expert for Block's online data projections and event-streaming capabilities — designing the platform, frameworks, and standards others build on
• Lead the technical direction for real-time, event-driven data systems used by business units across Block
• Build and operate streaming pipelines and projection frameworks on high-volume event data
• Partner with engineering teams across Block to turn Kafka event streams into reliable, low-latency data products
• Improve the reliability, observability, and data quality of streaming systems running in production
• Mentor engineers on the team and shape platform architecture and standards
• Contribute to and grow familiar with the team's other domains over time — supporting our third-party data proxy backend applications, graph data store capabilities, and offline batch data projections

You Have

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience (or Block equivalent, as referenced in go/levels)
• Deep experience designing and operating distributed, high-throughput backend systems in production
• Hands-on experience with event-driven architecture and streaming platforms such as Kafka
• Experience building streaming or real-time data systems; hands-on experience with Spark Structured Streaming or Flink is strongly preferred
• Proficiency in a JVM language such as Kotlin, or a comparable backend or systems programming background
• Experience building on cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS
• A track record of leading technical projects and mentoring other engineers
• Bonus points for a data engineering background (building data pipelines, lakehouse or warehouse modeling, or large-scale batch and streaming systems)

Technologies We Use and Teach

• Kafka, Spark, Spark Structured Streaming, Iceberg, Databricks, Snowflake, dbt, Prefect, block-forge, DataHub, Kotlin, AWS, CloudEvents

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 an equal opportunity employer evaluating all employees and job applicants without regard to identity or any legally protected class. We will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and "fair chance" ordinances.

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.

While there is no specific deadline to apply for this role, U.S. roles are typically open for an average of 55 days before being filled by a successful candidate. Please refer to the date listed at the top of this job page for when this role was first posted.