Staff Software Engineer - Real-Time Data Enablement

Block; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 217,800 - 326,800; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work

Medical insurance

Flexible time off

Retirement savings plans

Job summary

Block is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to design and lead the data projection and event-streaming platform. You will define standards for low-latency, production-grade data products built on streaming data, collaborating across Risk, Compliance, Data Engineering, and Data Science.

You will own the technical direction for real-time data systems, mentor engineers, and partner with multiple teams to mature streaming pipelines while expanding the team’s domain knowledge across the data platform.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience or Block-equivalent.
• Deep experience designing and operating distributed, high-throughput backend systems in production.
• Hands-on experience with event-driven architecture and streaming platforms such as Kafka.
• Experience building streaming or real-time data systems; Spark Structured Streaming or Flink preferred.
• Proficiency in a JVM language such as Kotlin or similar backend background.
• Experience building on cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS.
• Track record of leading technical projects and mentoring engineers.
• Bonus points for data engineering background (pipelines, lakehouse, batch/streaming).

Responsibilities

• Become the subject-matter expert for Block's online data projections and event-streaming capabilities—designing the platform, frameworks, and standards others build on.
• Lead the technical direction for real-time, event-driven data systems used by business units across Block.
• Build and operate streaming pipelines and projection frameworks on high-volume event data.
• Partner with engineering teams across Block to turn Kafka event streams into reliable, low-latency data products.
• Improve the reliability, observability, and data quality of streaming systems in production.
• Mentor engineers and shape platform architecture and standards.
• Contribute to and grow familiar with other domains like the third-party data proxy backend and graph data store.

Skills

8+ years experience

Event-driven design

Mentoring engineers

Kotlin

Education

Tools

Kafka

Spark

Iceberg

Databricks

Snowflake

dbt

Prefect

DataHub

Kotlin

AWS

CloudEvents

Job description

Block is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to design and lead the data projection and event-streaming platform. You will define standards for low-latency, production-grade data products built on streaming data, collaborating across Risk, Compliance, Data Engineering, and Data Science.

You will own the technical direction for real-time data systems, mentor engineers, and partner with multiple teams to mature streaming pipelines while expanding the team’s domain knowledge across the data platform.