Senior Database Platform Engineer — Remote

Block, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 185,000 - 310,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work option

Medical insurance

Flexible time off

Retirement savings plans

Family planning

Job summary

Block, Inc. is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for the Product Platform team in the Bay Area.

You will help design and operate database and storage platform software, collaborating across backend services, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure to deliver reliable products. The role emphasizes a generalist mindset, deep database knowledge, and using AI to accelerate learning and development while maintaining strong engineering judgment.

Qualifications

• Experience building and operating backend, infrastructure, or distributed systems.
• Production experience with relational databases.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals across unfamiliar systems.
• Understanding of transactions, indexing, replication, and query performance.
• Experience in database infrastructure, distributed storage, cloud services, or Kubernetes.
• Ability to turn ambiguous problems into clear plans and solutions.
• Comfort debugging production systems and collaborating across teams.
• Interest in using AI as part of engineering workflow.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate database and storage platform software.
• Build services, APIs, and tooling for provisioning, migrations, upgrades.
• Solve scaling and performance challenges while ensuring data correctness.
• Collaborate across database behavior, application code, and cloud infra.
• Guide schema design and platform adoption with engineering teams.
• Lead technical projects end-to-end including on-call ownership.
• Balance performance, reliability, cost, and maintainability.
• Leverage AI tools to accelerate development and understanding.
• Support a culture of curiosity, ownership, and learning.

Skills

Relational databases

Backend development

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Cloud services

Observability

Developer tooling

Go

Java

Ruby

AI tooling

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

MySQL

AWS Aurora

Vitess

DynamoDB

Redis/ElastiCache

OpenSearch

AWS

Kubernetes

Go

Java

Ruby

AI-assisted engineering tools

Job description

Block, Inc. is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for the Product Platform team in the Bay Area.

You will help design and operate database and storage platform software, collaborating across backend services, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure to deliver reliable products. The role emphasizes a generalist mindset, deep database knowledge, and using AI to accelerate learning and development while maintaining strong engineering judgment.