Staff Applied ML Engineer: Intelligent Signals & Ranking

Block, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 277,000 - 415,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work option

Medical insurance

Flexible time off

Retirement savings plans

Family planning

Job summary

Block, Inc. seeks a Staff Applied Machine Learning Engineer focused on Intelligent Data, Signals & Systems to build production ML systems that transform customer behavior, product context, and model outputs into trusted signals used by recommendations, ranking, risk-aware decisioning, and growth.

The role centers on customer intelligence and reusable model-derived signal systems across ranking, retrieval, and next-best-action, enabling product surfaces and internal tools with verifiable

Qualifications

• 12+ years building and operating production software and ML systems for business-critical products.
• Deep expertise in intelligent systems such as ranking/retrieval, recommendations, search, personalization, growth and lifecycle ML, customer intelligence, propensity/churn/LTV, next-best-action, or model-derived risk signals.
• Strong production ML judgment across feature pipelines, model serving, experimentation, monitoring, feedback loops, online/offline consistency, and reliable signal interfaces.
• Ability to evaluate impact beyond short-term conversion, including trust, fairness, access, risk, compliance, and long-term engagement.
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools with appropriate verification, testing, and review for customer-impacting systems.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate production ML systems that turn customer and product context into trusted signals, rankings, recommendations, and decision capabilities.
• Design production data and signal contracts that define intended use, freshness, provenance, confidence, eligibility, and calibration for downstream consumers.
• Own ranking, retrieval, recommendation, search, propensity, and next-best-action systems end to end, from feature and candidate generation through serving, experimentation, monitoring, and feedback loops.
• Evaluate customer and business impact beyond short-term conversion, including trust, fairness, access, risk, compliance, long-term engagement, and segment-level performance.
• Partner across product, growth, data, platform, modeling, risk, and compliance to translate ambiguous goals into measurable ML system designs.
• Use AI and agents to accelerate development, analysis, testing, documentation, and operations while exposing reusable capabilities to product services, internal tools, and AI-assisted workflows.

Skills

Production software

ML systems

Ranking/retrieval

Recommendations

Search

Propensity/LTV

Experimentation

Online/offline evaluation

Tools

Python

Java

Kotlin

SQL

TensorFlow

PyTorch

XGBoost/LightGBM

Kubernetes

Data warehouses

Job description

Block, Inc. seeks a Staff Applied Machine Learning Engineer focused on Intelligent Data, Signals & Systems to build production ML systems that transform customer behavior, product context, and model outputs into trusted signals used by recommendations, ranking, risk-aware decisioning, and growth.

The role centers on customer intelligence and reusable model-derived signal systems across ranking, retrieval, and next-best-action, enabling product surfaces and internal tools with verifiable