Senior Data Engineer, Risk

Block; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 168,300 - 297,000; Full time

Job summary

Block is seeking a skilled Data Engineer in San Francisco, California, responsible for managing data architecture, modeling, and governance across various financial products like Cash App. This role supports risk and compliance teams, ensuring safe user experiences through effective data solutions.

The ideal candidate will have at least 10 years of experience with strong SQL and Python skills, and the ability to lead data-driven projects from inception to deployment.

Competitive pay ranges based on experience ensure a rewarding workplace culture.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering or equivalent.
• Proficiency in SQL, Python, and Dbt is essential.
• Experience in managing large data engineering projects end-to-end.

Responsibilities

• Lead data model creation and optimization.
• Standardize business and product metrics.
• Build data quality monitoring systems.
• Participate in on-call rotation and issue resolution.
• Collaborate with non-technical partners for automated solutions.

Skills

SQL

Python

Dbt

Airflow

Prefect

Data modeling

Data quality monitoring

ETL scheduling

Schema design

Machine Learning automation

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience

Master’s degree

Tools

Snowflake

Databricks

Terraform

Github

Job description

It all started with an idea at Block in 2013. Initially built to take the pain out of peer-to-peer payments, Cash App has gone from a simple product with a single purpose to a dynamic ecosystem, developing unique financial products, including Afterpay/Clearpay, to provide a better way to send, spend, invest, borrow and save to our 50+ million monthly active customers. We want to redefine the world’s relationship with money to make it more relatable, instantly available, and universally accessible.

Today, Cash App has thousands of employees working globally across office and remote locations, with a culture geared toward innovation, collaboration and impact. We’ve been a distributed team since day one, and many of our roles can be done remotely from the countries where Cash App operates. No matter the location, we tailor our experience to ensure our employees are creative, productive, and happy.

The Role

As a Data Engineer you will handle everything from data architecture and modeling to data pipeline tooling and dashboarding. You will enable other compliance and risk teams to make impactful business decisions by laying the foundation of our large and unique datasets that span across multiple products. This role will support compliance or risk product data engineering teams.

The Compliance Data Engineering team at Block supports the detection and reporting of suspicious financial crimes activity across Cash App, Square, and Afterpay. We work globally with partners in business, engineering, counsel, and product to provide a safe user experience for our customers while minimizing and potentially eliminating bad activity on our platform.

The Risk Product Data Engineering team at Block builds reliable data foundations that help protect customers across Cash App, Square, and Afterpay. We partner with product, engineering, compliance, and legal teams to support risk detection, reporting, instrumentation, and ML-ready datasets across critical domains including identity, account access, eligibility, controls, and disputes.

You Will

• Lead the creation and optimization of existing data models through AI code generation on eventing, customer level, and process level data.
• Standardize business and product metric definitions in curated and optimized datasets, and develop data dictionaries and other related documentation.
• Build monitoring to assess data quality and lineage and on top build AI agents for false positive reduction and automated resolution.
• Participate in on‑call rotation, monitor daily execution, diagnose and log issues, and fix business critical pipelines to ensure SLAs are met with internal stakeholders. Automate this process through AI agents to focus human effort on highest priority tasks.
• Work with non-technical partners and product teams to understand their needs, translate business requirements into applicable data requirements, and come up with automated end-to-end solutions.

You Have

• A minimum of 10 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 8 years and a Master’s degree; or equivalent experience.
• High proficiency in SQL, Python, and Dbt.
• Experience designing medium-to-large data engineering solutions and responsible for the entire lifecycle of projects including scoping, design, development, testing, deployment, and documentation.
• Experience with ETL scheduling technologies with dependency checking, such as Airflow or Prefect.
• Experience in schema design and dimensional data modeling.
• Experience with setting up data quality and data lineage monitoring.
• Experience with data driven decisions through AI and agentic automation.

Technologies We Use and Teach

• Snowflake
• Databricks
• Dbt
• Github
• Airflow
• Prefect
• Omni
• Terraform

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 our recruiter, who will treat these requests confidentially.

Pay ranges vary by location and are determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. The ranges are as follows:

• Zone A: $198,000-297,000 USD
• Zone B: $188,100-282,100 USD
• Zone C: $178,200-267,400 USD
• Zone D: $168,300-252,500 USD