Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Bitkey; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 189,000 - 284,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare coverage

Retirement plans

Employee stock purchase program

Wellness programs

Paid parental leave

Paid time off

Paid sick leave

Learning and development resources

Life insurance

Job summary

Block, Inc. is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to proactively improve the reliability of its platform and critical infrastructure. You will drive AI-driven observability, automation, and incident analysis to reduce toil while enabling safe, scalable product development.

You will participate in primary oncall (12 hours per day, one week every few weeks) and lead incident command during high-severity events, focusing on rapid stabilization and clear escalation paths.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software development experience.
• Proven oncall experience for high-availability systems.
• Experience with AI-driven tooling for observability or automation.
• Strong incident management and blameless postmortems.
• Experience with CI/CD and progressive rollout strategies.

Responsibilities

• Build and extend platforms to improve system reliability.
• Lead incident command during sev 0-1 incidents.
• Standardize reliability tooling across multiple platforms and organizations.
• Triage, coordinate, and lead stabilization of sev 0-1 incidents.
• Drive platform-wide reliability improvements and deploy-safety patterns.
• Use AI-driven systems to improve signal detection and root cause analysis.
• Design and implement safe deployment patterns (progressive delivery, automated rollback).

Skills

Distributed systems

AI-driven tooling

Incident management

On-call leadership

CI/CD pipelines

Observability

Root cause analysis

Kubernetes

Backend development

Blameless postmortems

Tools

Datadog

LaunchDarkly

Terraform

Kubernetes

Istio/Envoy

AWS

gRPC/Protobuf

MySQL/DynamoDB

Job description

Block builds simple, powerful tools that make progress towards an economy that is truly open to all.

Each of our brands unlocks different aspects of the economy for more people. Square makes commerce and financial services accessible to sellers. Cash App is the easy way to spend, send, and store money. Afterpay is transforming the way customers manage their spending over time. TIDAL is a music platform that empowers artists to thrive as entrepreneurs. Bitkey is a simple self-custody wallet built for bitcoin. Proto is a suite of bitcoin mining products and services. Together, we're helping build a financial system that is open to everyone. Join us.

The Role

As a member of the SRE team, you will proactively and reactively improve the reliability of Block's platform and critical infrastructure. You are metrics-driven, systems-oriented, and focused on building distributed platforms that enable safe, scalable product development.

You will leverage and continuously improve AI-driven tooling and automation to enhance observability, accelerate incident detection and response, and reduce operational toil. This includes applying AI to incident analysis, alert tuning, and operational workflows.

You will participate in primary platform oncall (12 hours per day, one week every few weeks, depending on team size), supporting Block's most critical (Tier 0) services. In this role, you will lead incident command, coordinate mitigation, and drive effective escalation during high-severity events.

You Will

• Build and extend platforms to improve system reliability
• Work on team goals that encompass reliability for the entire company
• Standardize reliability tools across multiple platforms and organizations
• Triage, coordinate, and lead stabilization of sev 0-1 incidents
• Serve as primary oncall, maintaining structured escalation paths and exercising leadership escalation
• Drive platform-wide reliability improvements, shared operational tooling, and deploy-safety patterns
• Use AI-driven systems to improve signal detection, reduce noise, and accelerate root cause analysis
• Design and implement safe deployment patterns (progressive delivery, automated rollback, guardrails)

You Have

• Drive to root cause systems with many moving parts and take the necessary steps to fix them
• Demonstrated technical initiative and leadership on previous projects, especially those with a backend/platform focus
• Familiarity with AI-driven tooling for observability, incident analysis, or automation
• A mindset that naturally reaches for AI to accelerate problem-solving and reduce toil
• Experience running production oncall for high-availability systems
• Strong incident management skills — structured triage, mitigation under pressure, blameless postmortems
• Fluency with CI/CD pipelines, progressive rollout strategies, and rollback automation
• Monitoring & observability expertise — building/tuning alerts for uptime, error rates, latency regression, and resource exhaustion
• Ability to create and maintain evidence-based maturity assessments using trailing 90-day data windows.
• Comfort with vendor/dependency management — maintaining validated escalation contacts reachable within ≤ 5 minutes.
• Boundless curiosity, autonomy, and a strong sense of accountability
• A strong desire to perform and grow as an engineer
• 5+ years of software development experience

Technologies We Use and Teach

• Kotlin, Modern Java (11+)
• HTTP, JSON, gRPC, and Protocol Buffers
• MySQL / Vitess / DynamoDB
• Event driven architectures
• DataDog
• LaunchDarkly
• Terraform, Kubernetes, Istio/Envoy
• Amazon Web Services

This program shifts Block from reactive incident handling to repeatable, system-wide reliability gains - fewer customer-visible incidents, faster response, higher product velocity, and lower burnout across the organization.

We're working to build a more inclusive economy where our customers have equal access to opportunity, and we strive to live by these same values in building our workplace. Block is a proud equal opportunity employer. We work hard to evaluate all employees and job applicants consistently, based solely on the core competencies required of the role at hand, and without regard to any legally protected class. 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 their recruiter, who will treat these requests as confidentially as possible.

Full-time Employee Benefits Include The Following

• Healthcare coverage (Medical, Vision and Dental insurance)
• Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Account
• Retirement Plans including company match
• Employee Stock Purchase Program
• Wellness programs, including access to mental health, 1:1 financial planners, and a monthly wellness allowance
• Paid parental and caregiving leave
• Paid time off (including 12 paid holidays)
• Paid sick leave (1 hour per 26 hours worked (max 80 hours per calendar year to the extent legally permissible) for non-exempt employees and covered by our Flexible Time Off policy for exempt employees)
• Learning and Development resources
• Paid Life insurance, AD&D, and disability benefits

These benefits are further detailed in Block's policies. This role is also eligible to participate in Block's equity plan subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies, and may be eligible for a sign‑on bonus. Sales roles may be eligible to participate in a commission plan subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies. Pay and benefits are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefit plans.

Block takes a market-based approach to pay, and pay may vary depending on your location. U.S. locations are categorized into one of four zones based on a cost of labor index for that geographic area. The successful candidate's starting pay will be determined based on job‑related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. These ranges may be modified in the future.

Zone A: USD $189,000 - USD $283,600

Zone B: USD $179,600 - USD $269,400

Zone C: USD $170,100 - USD $255,100

Zone D: USD $160,700 - USD $241,100

Use of AI in Our Hiring Process

We may use automated AI tools to evaluate job applications for efficiency and consistency. These tools comply with local regulations, including bias audits, and we handle all personal data in accordance with state and local privacy laws.

Contact us here with hiring practice or data usage questions.

Every benefit we offer is designed with one goal: empowering you to do the best work of your career while building the life you want. Remote work, medical insurance, flexible time off, retirement savings plans, and modern family planning are just some of our offering.

Block, Inc. (NYSE: XYZ) builds technology to increase access to the global economy. Each of our brands unlocks different aspects of the economy for more people. Square makes commerce and financial services accessible to sellers. Cash App is the easy way to spend, send, and store money. Afterpay is transforming the way customers manage their spending over time. TIDAL is a music platform that empowers artists to thrive as entrepreneurs. Bitkey is a simple self‑custody wallet built for bitcoin. Proto is a suite of bitcoin mining products and services. Together, we're helping build a financial system that is open to everyone.