Senior Payment API Engineer – Scale Global Payments Remote

Block; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 218,000 - 327,000; 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 engineer to design, build, and scale customer-facing payment APIs and the critical systems that power them. You’ll lead complex projects end-to-end, operate high-volume production services, and improve reliability and security across global payments.

You will work with Kotlin/Go/TypeScript on AWS/Kafka, apply AI-assisted tools with judgement, and mentor others while delivering high-quality software for merchants and users worldwide.

Qualifications

• Experience building, maintaining, and scaling customer-facing financial or payment APIs.
• Experience designing and operating high-volume distributed systems with emphasis on correctness, security, and reliability.
• Understanding of payment API concerns: idempotency, retries, async processing, backward compatibility, partial failures.
• Led complex engineering projects from unclear requirements to production with technical trade-offs.
• Diagnosed production issues and improved systems via monitoring and incident response.
• Fluency with AI-assisted engineering tools and ability to validate generated code.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, maintain, and scale customer-facing payment APIs with clear contracts and reliability.
• Lead end-to-end projects: requirements, trade-offs, incremental delivery, testing, rollout, maintenance.
• Operate critical payment systems serving worldwide traffic and participate in on-call rotations.
• Improve performance, observability, fault tolerance, and security; automate repetitive tasks.
• Collaborate with product and engineering partners to turn payment requirements into reusable capabilities.
• Apply AI-assisted tooling thoughtfully, ensuring quality and security in delivery.
• Mentor teammates through design and code reviews and maintain clear documentation.

Skills

Payment APIs experience

Distributed systems

Incident response

Project leadership

AI-assisted tooling

Mentoring & code reviews

On-call experience

Clear communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Master’s degree

PhD

Tools

AWS

Kafka

Kotlin

Go

TypeScript

Job description

Block is seeking a senior engineer to design, build, and scale customer-facing payment APIs and the critical systems that power them. You’ll lead complex projects end-to-end, operate high-volume production services, and improve reliability and security across global payments.

You will work with Kotlin/Go/TypeScript on AWS/Kafka, apply AI-assisted tools with judgement, and mentor others while delivering high-quality software for merchants and users worldwide.