Remote Senior Database Platform Engineer – AI-Driven Backend

Block, Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 207,000 - 310,000; Full time

Job summary

Block, Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Product Platform to strengthen database and storage platform capabilities.

You will design, implement, and operate systems that support multiple products, across backend services, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure. You will join the Data Stores team to improve database provisioning, migrations, and performance while collaborating with engineers across teams.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 3 years and a Master’s degree; or equivalent work experience.
• Experience building and operating backend, infrastructure, or distributed systems, with meaningful experience working with relational databases in production.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to work across unfamiliar systems, codebases, and technical domains.
• A practical understanding of database concepts such as transactions, indexing, replication, schema evolution, and query performance.
• Experience in database infrastructure, distributed storage, online migrations, cloud services, Kubernetes, observability, or developer tooling.
• Track record of turning ambiguous technical problems into clear plans and working solutions.
• Comfort debugging production systems, explaining technical tradeoffs, and partnering with engineers and technical leaders across teams.
• Interest in using AI as part of your engineering workflow and helping others apply it thoughtfully.
• Curiosity, judgment, and a willingness to ask questions early, go deep when needed, and take ownership beyond a single component.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate database and storage platform software that helps Block engineers build reliable products.
• Build services, APIs, and developer tools that automate database provisioning, schema changes, data migrations, upgrades, and other lifecycle operations.
• Solve database scaling and performance problems while protecting data correctness, durability, and availability.
• Work across database behavior, application code, distributed systems, networking, and cloud infrastructure to understand problems and deliver pragmatic solutions.
• Partner with engineering teams on schema design, query patterns, and platform adoption, turning recurring challenges into reusable capabilities.
• Help unify and modernize existing data store platforms, reducing operational toil and making safe practices the default.
• Lead technical projects from problem framing through implementation, testing, rollout, and operational ownership, including on-call participation and incident response.
• Make thoughtful tradeoffs between performance, reliability, cost, maintainability, and developer experience.
• Use AI tools to accelerate development and system understanding, while applying careful review, testing, and engineering judgment.
• Contribute to a culture that values curiosity, direct communication, early ownership, and learning through shipping.

Skills

Database systems

Distributed systems

Go

Java

Ruby

AI in development

Problem solving

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

MySQL

AWS Aurora

Vitess

DynamoDB

Redis/ElastiCache

OpenSearch

Kubernetes

Job description

Block, Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Product Platform to strengthen database and storage platform capabilities.

You will design, implement, and operate systems that support multiple products, across backend services, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure. You will join the Data Stores team to improve database provisioning, migrations, and performance while collaborating with engineers across teams.