Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience

Block; Oregon; Hybrid; USD 218,000 - 327,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work

Medical insurance

Flexible time off

Retirement savings plans

Family planning support

Job summary

Block, Inc. is hiring a Developer Experience Engineer to build tooling and agent workflows that enable engineers and autonomous agents to change our extensive monorepos quickly and safely.

You will own interfaces for observing, steering, and providing context to agents, and you will craft guardrails that keep complexity in check as agents handle bigger changes. You will design agentic loops, build scalable workflows for framework upgrades and language migrations, and drive adoption across the

Qualifications

• Shipping developer tooling at scale with measurable adoption and support.
• Building agent workflows with tool use, context management, and verification.
• Leading migrations or large refactors from planning through rollout.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship tools engineers and their agents use daily (CLIs, desktop integrations, observing, unblocking, steering).
• Design and evolve agentic loops and harnesses for reliable engineering work.
• Drive large-scale changes across codebases with minimal disruption to product teams.
• Build guardrails, tests, and automation to keep agent-authored changes safe to land.
• Identify friction in development workflows for humans and agents and fix root causes.
• Partner with internal and external builders to measure adoption and impact of your work.
• Set technical direction and mentor engineers on agent design, tooling, and codebase health.

Skills

Developer tooling

Agent workflows

Framework upgrades

Large codebases

Communication

Job description

About the role

More and more of our engineering work now runs through autonomous agents, and those agents can only be as effective as the tools, context, and codebase around them. As a Developer Experience Engineer, you'll build the tooling and agent workflows that let humans and agents change our largest monorepos quickly and safely. You'll own the interfaces engineers use to observe, steer, and give context to the agents working on our code. You'll also build the guardrails that keep complexity in check as those agents take on bigger changes. Large-scale work like framework upgrades, language migrations, and dependency health is still part of the job, but you'll do it by building and steering agents rather than making the changes by hand. This is a high-leverage role. Every improvement you ship multiplies across the whole engineering organization.

What you'll do

• Build and ship the tools engineers and their agents use every day, such as CLIs, desktop integrations, and interfaces for observing, unblocking, and steering autonomous agents, and own their adoption, distribution, and support
• Design and evolve agentic loops (the plan, act, verify, and iterate cycles) and the harnesses, skills, and context that let agents do real engineering work reliably
• Build agent workflows that drive large-scale changes across the codebase, including framework upgrades, language migrations, and dependency updates, with minimal disruption to product teams
• Build the guardrails, tests, and automation that make large, agent-authored changes safe to land, and track the leading indicators of growing complexity
• Find friction in the development workflow for both humans and agents, and fix the root causes
• Partner with builders inside and outside of engineering to understand their pain points, and measure the adoption and impact of what you ship
• Set technical direction and mentor other engineers on agent design, tooling, and codebase health

What we’re looking for

• Shipping developer tooling at scale: You've shipped tools that engineers use daily, such as CLIs, desktop integrations, configuration management, or internal platforms. You understand what it takes to drive adoption, debug problems, and support users.
• Scaling work with agents: You've built agent workflows that finished work that would normally take a team weeks. Examples include generating codebase summaries or world models, writing skills and loops, or orchestrating a team of semi-deterministic agents. You have a deep understanding of agentic loops (tool use, context management, verification, failure handling) and are eager to keep evolving them as the field changes.
• Evolving frameworks and large codebases: You have deep experience with application or platform frameworks, including upgrading them and managing their evolution over time. You also have a track record of leading migrations or large refactors from planning through rollout.
• Significant experience (typically 10+ years for Staff, 7+ for Senior) working in large, complex codebases
• Strong communication skills and the ability to build trust with teams by owning the outcomes of your work

Nice to have

• Experience with harness engineering or context engineering
• Experience with agent observability, for example through OpenTelemetry
• Experience distributing internal tools (versioning, release channels, auto-update) and measuring adoption with telemetry or surveys
• Background in developer productivity metrics, test infrastructure, or CI/CD
• A passion for intuitive user experience and good taste in elegant solutions
• Open source contributions to developer tooling or agent frameworks

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:$217,800—$326,800 USD
• Zone B:$207,000—$310,400 USD
• Zone C:$196,100—$294,100 USD
• Zone D:$185,200—$277,800 USD

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. Check out our other benefits at Block.

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.

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