Job description
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
As a member of the SRE team, you will proactively and reactively improve the reliability of Block's platform and critical infrastructure. You are metrics-driven, systems-oriented, and focused on building distributed platforms that enable safe, scalable product development.
You will leverage and continuously improve AI-driven tooling and automation to enhance observability, accelerate incident detection and response, and reduce operational toil. This includes applying AI to incident analysis, alert tuning, and operational workflows.
You will participate in primary platform oncall (12 hours per day, one week every few weeks, depending on team size), supporting Block's most critical (Tier 0) services. In this role, you will lead incident command, coordinate mitigation, and drive effective escalation during high-severity events.
You Will
• Build and extend platforms to improve system reliability
• Work on team goals that encompass reliability for the entire company
• Standardize reliability tools across multiple platforms and organizations
• Triage, coordinate, and lead stabilization of sev 0–1 incidents
• Serve as primary oncall, maintaining structured escalation paths and exercising leadership escalation
• Drive platform-wide reliability improvements, shared operational tooling, and deploy-safety patterns
• Use AI-driven systems to improve signal detection, reduce noise, and accelerate root cause analysis
• Design and implement safe deployment patterns (progressive delivery, automated rollback, guardrails)
You Have
• Drive to root cause systems with many moving parts and take the necessary steps to fix them
• Demonstrated technical initiative and leadership on previous projects, especially those with a backend/platform focus
• Familiarity with AI-driven tooling for observability, incident analysis, or automation
• A mindset that naturally reaches for AI to accelerate problem-solving and reduce toil
• Experience running production oncall for high-availability systems
• Strong incident management skills — structured triage, mitigation under pressure, blameless postmortems
• Fluency with CI/CD pipelines, progressive rollout strategies, and rollback automation
• Monitoring & observability expertise — building/tuning alerts for uptime, error rates, latency regression, and resource exhaustion
• Ability to create and maintain evidence-based maturity assessments using trailing 90-day data windows.
• Comfort with vendor/dependency management — maintaining validated escalation contacts reachable within ≤ 5 minutes.
• Boundless curiosity, autonomy, and a strong sense of accountability
• A strong desire to perform and grow as an engineer
• 5+ years of software development experience
Technologies We Use and Teach
• Kotlin, Modern Java (11+)
• HTTP, JSON, gRPC, and Protocol Buffers
• MySQL / Vitess / DynamoDB
• Event driven architectures
• DataDog
• LaunchDarkly
• Terraform, Kubernetes, Istio/Envoy
• Amazon Web Services
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 identity or 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 . Block is a globally distributed company and this role will require working with other employees in multiple time zones. You may be required to perform work outside of normal business as part of this role
Application Guidelines
Candidates may submit up to 9 active applications within a 60-day period. Reapplications to the same role are accepted 90 days after a previous application has been reviewed.
Use of AI in Our Hiring Process
We may use automated AI tools to evaluate job applications for efficiency and consistency. These tools comply with local regulations, including bias audits, and we handle all personal data in accordance with state and local privacy laws.
Contact us here with hiring practice or data usage questions.
Every benefit we offer is designed with one goal: empowering you to do the best work of your career while building the life you want. Remote work, medical insurance, flexible time off, retirement savings plans, and modern family planning are just some of our offering. Check out our other benefits at Block.
Block, Inc. (NYSE: XYZ) builds technology to increase access to the global economy. Each of our brands unlocks different aspects of the economy for more people. Square makes commerce and financial services accessible to sellers. Cash App is the easy way to spend, send, and store money. Afterpay is transforming the way customers manage their spending over time. TIDAL is a music platform that empowers artists to thrive as entrepreneurs. Bitkey is a simple self-custody wallet built for bitcoin. Proto is a suite of bitcoin mining products and services. Together, we’re helping build a financial system that is open to everyone.
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