Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience

Block; Sacramento (CA); Remote; USD 218,000 - 327,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work

Medical insurance

Flexible time off

Retirement savings plans

Family planning benefits

Job summary

Block, Inc. is seeking a Developer Experience Engineer to optimize our extensive monorepos, enabling faster builds, safer migrations, and scalable workflows for human and AI engineers alike.

You will own tooling, framework migrations, and the development process across multiple teams, driving high-leverage improvements with measurable impact on productivity and reliability.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in large, complex codebases (Senior) or 10+ years (Staff)
• Deep experience with application or platform frameworks and evolving them
• Track record of migrations or large refactors from planning through rollout
• Able to navigate unfamiliar code quickly and make changes across many teams
• Understanding of agentic loops (tool use, context management, verification, failure handling)
• Strong communication skills and ability to build trust with teams

Responsibilities

• Lead and execute large-scale codebase changes, including framework upgrades and dependency updates
• Design and evolve agentic loops for safe, automated engineering work
• Identify and fix friction in the developer workflow
• Improve build tooling and CI performance
• Build guardrails, tests, and automation for large changes
• Partner with product engineering to measure impact of work
• Set technical direction and mentor engineers on migrations and tooling

Skills

Codebase migration

Framework upgrades

Large-scale refactors

Agentic loops

Cross-team communication

Mentoring engineers

Tools

Bazel

Codemods tooling

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Block is one company built from many blocks, all united by the same purpose of economic empowerment. The blocks that form our foundational teams — People, Finance, Counsel, Hardware, Information Security, Platform Infrastructure Engineering, and more — provide support and guidance at the corporate level. They work across business groups and around the globe, spanning time zones and disciplines to develop inclusive People policies, forecast finances, give legal counsel, safeguard systems, nurture new initiatives, and more. Every challenge creates possibilities, and we need different perspectives to see them all. Bring yours to Block.

The Role

Our engineers are only as effective as the tools, codebase, and workflows around them. As a Developer Experience Engineer, you'll make our large, evolving codebase easier to build, change, and reason about, for both human developers and AI agents. You will be responsible for the developer experience in our largest monorepos: building tools for and driving framework and language migrations, keeping dependencies healthy, improving build and test infrastructure, and shaping how agentic workflows operate in our development process. This is a high-leverage role. Every improvement you ship multiplies across the whole engineering organization.

What you'll do

• Lead and execute large-scale changes across the codebase, including framework upgrades, language migrations, and dependency updates, with minimal disruption to product teams
• Design and evolve agentic loops: the plan, act, verify, and iterate cycles that let AI agents do real engineering work safely and reliably
• Identify friction in the developer workflow (slow builds, flaky tests, confusing abstractions) and fix the root causes
• Improve build tooling and CI performance, including work with Bazel or a comparable build system
• Build the guardrails, tests, and automation that make large, automated changes safe to land
• Partner with product engineering teams to understand their pain points and measure the impact of your work
• Set technical direction and mentor other engineers on migration strategy, tooling, and codebase health

What we’re looking for

Required

• Significant experience (typically 7+ years for Senior, 10+ for Staff) working in large, complex codebases
• Deep experience with application or platform frameworks, including upgrading them and managing their evolution over time
• Track record of leading migrations or large refactors, from planning through rollout
• Comfort navigating unfamiliar code quickly and making sound changes across many teams' areas
• A solid understanding of agentic loops (tool use, context management, verification, failure handling) and a genuine willingness to keep investing in and evolving them as the field changes
• Strong communication skills and the ability to build trust with teams whose code you're changing

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with Bazel or similar build systems (Buck, Pants, Nx, Gradle, etc.)
• Experience with codemods, AST-based tooling, or automated refactoring at scale
• Background in CI/CD, test infrastructure, or developer productivity metrics
• Experience building or integrating LLM-based coding tools into engineering workflows
• Open source contributions to build tools, frameworks, or developer tooling

Pay

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. To find a location's zone designation, please refer to this resource.

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

Benefits

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.

About 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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