People Intelligence Architect

Block; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Block in San Francisco is building a unified people data ecosystem that spans HRIS, ATS, performance, and engagement systems. You’ll own end-to-end pipelines, models, and agentic AI that turn data into actionable insight for leaders.

This is a senior individual contributor role: design architecture, write production code, and set technical standards while mentoring peers. You’ll work across data engineering, data science, and people analytics to keep systems trustworthy and compliant.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of relevant experience.
• Proven ability to design end-to-end data systems.
• Strong background in data engineering and analytics for HR/People data.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and agentic frameworks.
• Excellent communication with both executives and engineers.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain data pipelines unifying HRIS, ATS, performance, and compensation data.
• Model data for analytics and ML with focus on quality, lineage, privacy, governance.
• Develop predictive and diagnostic models (attrition, hiring funnel health, org network).
• Translate questions into rigorous analyses for leaders.
• Collaborate on our employee engagement survey analytics and turn results into actionable insights.
• Design and deploy AI agents and automations that turn insights into workflows.
• Establish guardrails and human-in-the-loop patterns for safe agentic systems on sensitive data.
• Own the architecture tying pipelines, models, and agents into one system.
• Set technical direction and standards for People data and AI; mentor peers.
• Partner with People, Data Platform, Security, and Legal to ensure compliance and scalability.

Skills

SQL

Python

dbt/Airflow

Cloud data warehouses

Tools

SQL

Python

dbt

Airflow

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

We're looking for a cross-disciplinary builder to own how our people data ecosystem comes together - from raw pipelines to predictive models to the agentic workflows that put insight into action. This is not a traditional People Analyst role. You won't just answer questions with dashboards; you'll design and build the end-to-end system that makes People data trustworthy, intelligent, and increasingly autonomous.

This is a senior individual contributor role. You'll lead through technical depth and craft rather than headcount - designing architecture, writing production code, and setting the technical bar for how People data and AI work at our company.

You’ll operate at the intersection of data engineering , data science , people analytics , and agentic AI - fluent enough in each to see how the whole system connects, and hands‑on enough to build the connective tissue yourself.

You Will

• Design, build, and maintain reliable data pipelines that unify people data across HRIS, ATS, performance, compensation, and engagement systems.
• Model data for analytics and ML use, with a focus on quality, lineage, privacy, and governance of sensitive workforce data.
• Build predictive and diagnostic models (attrition, hiring funnel health, org network analysis, compensation equity, workforce planning).
• Translate ambiguous people questions into rigorous, defensible analyses - and translate results back into decisions leaders can act on.
• Partner on our semi‑annual employee engagement survey - from instrument design and data collection to analysis, driver identification, and turning results into actionable insight for leaders.
• Design and deploy AI agents and automations that operationalize insight: monitoring signals, generating reports, drafting recommendations, and triggering workflows without manual effort.
• Establish the guardrails, evaluation, and human‑in‑the‑loop patterns that make agentic systems safe and trustworthy on sensitive data.
• Own the architecture that ties pipelines, models, and agents into one coherent system - and continuously evolve it as tools and needs change.
• Set the technical direction and standards for People data and AI, and raise the bar through code review, design docs, and mentorship of peers (leading by influence, not by managing a team).
• Partner with People, Data Platform, Security, and Legal to ensure the system is compliant, scalable, and genuinely useful.

You Have

8+ years of relevant experience

• Proven experience building data pipelines (SQL, Python, dbt/Airflow or similar, cloud data warehouses).
• Solid data science foundation - statistics, ML, experiment design, and the judgment to know when a simple model beats a complex one.
• Working knowledge of people/HR data and the sensitivity, ethics, and nuance it demands.
• Hands‑on experience with LLMs and agentic frameworks - building automations, prompts, tool‑use, and evaluation loops.
• Strong systems thinking: you see how components connect and design for the whole, not just the part in front of you.
• Excellent communication - you can explain a model to an executive and a workflow to an engineer

Even Better

• Experience with people analytics platforms (Workday, Visier, etc.).
• Background in organizational network analysis or workforce planning.
• Experience deploying AI in regulated or privacy‑sensitive environments.

Why This Role is Difference

Most companies split this work across three or four people who rarely talk to each other - an engineer who builds pipes, an analyst who makes charts, and a data scientist who ships models into a void. You'll own the whole system, and use agentic AI to make it more than the sum of its parts. This is a role for a senior builder who wants deep technical ownership and impact without stepping off the tools to manage a team. If you're energized by building intelligent systems on top of the most human data a company has, this is for you.

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