Senior Backend Data Platform Engineer (Remote)

Block; California; Remote; USD 185,000 - 278,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work

Medical insurance

Flexible time off

Retirement savings plan

Family planning support

Job summary

Block is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Data Enablement team. You will design, build, and operate backend systems to move and serve data, expand external data acquisition, and contribute to Sessions analytics and ML initiatives.

Join a team that values ownership, strong architectural judgment, and willingness to learn across backend and data engineering domains. Prior data engineering is a plus, with emphasis on low-latency streaming and scalable pipelines.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience or equivalent.
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating distributed backend systems in production.
• Proficiency in a backend language such as Java or Kotlin with strong design fundamentals.
• Experience building on cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS.
• Ability to learn unfamiliar systems and communicate trade-offs clearly across teams.
• Bonus: data engineering background with data pipelines and large-scale processing.
• Bonus: hands-on Kafka and Spark Structured Streaming experience.

Responsibilities

• Design and build shared backend services and platforms for data acquisition, processing, and access across Block.
• Lead projects from problem definition through production, including rollout and operation.
• Work across backend services, event-driven systems, and batch/streaming processing for reliable data delivery.
• Collaborate with engineers, Data Foundations, and data scientists to create reusable platform capabilities.
• Make architectural decisions balancing reliability, latency, scalability, and cost.
• Improve observability, data quality, and operational reliability of systems.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to technical standards across domains.

Skills

Distributed backend systems

Java/Kotlin backend

AWS cloud

System design

Data engineering familiarity

Tools

Kafka

Spark Structured Streaming

Iceberg

Databricks

Snowflake

dbt

Prefect

DataHub

Job description

Block is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Data Enablement team. You will design, build, and operate backend systems to move and serve data, expand external data acquisition, and contribute to Sessions analytics and ML initiatives.

Join a team that values ownership, strong architectural judgment, and willingness to learn across backend and data engineering domains. Prior data engineering is a plus, with emphasis on low-latency streaming and scalable pipelines.