Sr. Machine Learning Engineer, Data & ML Platform

Company 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.

Job Description

All of Block’s product services are organized into business units with their own product and engineering teams. Underneath, there’s a connected platform team that supports the company. We are that platform. Within the platform, our team’s focus is on developer productivity in Data and AI. We bring tools that enable engineers to orchestrate workflows, train models, easily onboard onto foundational infrastructures, and improve their daily development experience. Our team works cross-functionally across Block’s business units to deliver the most impactful tools to developers, and oftentimes working with teams to understand specific needs, and then generalizing those across Block.

We’re looking for an enthusiastic and experienced Machine Learning Engineer to help us use AI to build impactful developer productivity tools for engineers across Block. You’ll bring together content from across Block’s business units and build a foundational connective layer to power AI applications to increase developer productivity. This unique opportunity will require you to develop good relationships with teams throughout Block and external vendors to collaborate on delivering highly visible and used tools. You’ll provide guidance to teams on what is possible with AI and help guide their AI product direction, in addition to collaboratively building those applications. This is an exciting opportunity to transform the developer experience at Block and become a company expert in AI!

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in training and deploying ML models, ML software development, and building customer-facing ML applications. Understanding of modern ML techniques (e.g. Large Language Models) and the ML lifecycle from data gathering, training, model evaluation, MLOps, and productionizing models.
• A desire to understand our clients’ needs to design tools and systems that solve our customer’s problems. As a platform team, our customers are internal developers and products.
• As a developer, you often think about how to improve your productivity and have a passion for intuiting the ideal developer experience.
• The ability to produce production-quality code and services incorporating testing, evaluation, monitoring, and exquisite documentation. Enjoy learning a new domain, hack MVP’s, and iterate to improve product.
• Experience using any of the major cloud vendors (GCP, AWS, Azure).
• Strong communication skills (verbal and written) with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience with Databricks and Large Language Models.

We use and teach:

• Python, Torch + HuggingFace, MLFlow
• Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Datadog, Kubernetes, and Docker
• Spark, Prefect, Databricks, Snowflake
• Techniques that use LLMs, including pre-training, fine-tuning, retrieval augmented generation.

Additional Information

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 $180,000 – USD $270,000
Zone B: USD $171,000 – USD $256,600
Zone C: USD $162,000 – USD $243,000
Zone D: USD $153,000 – USD $229,600

To find a location’s zone designation, please refer to this salary-zones”>resource. If a location of interest is not listed, please speak with a recruiter for additional information. 

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.

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, without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other 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. Want to learn more about what we’re doing to build a workplace that is fair and square? Check out our I+D page.

Additionally, we consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, assessing candidates in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

We’ve noticed a rise in recruiting impersonations across the industry, where individuals are sending fake job offer emails. Contact from any of our recruiters or employees will always come from an email address ending with @block.xyz, @squareup.com, @tidal.com, or @afterpay.com, @clearpay.co.uk.

Block, Inc. (NYSE: SQ) is a global technology company with a focus on financial services. Made up of Square, Cash App, Spiral, TIDAL, and TBD, we build tools to help more people access the economy. Square helps sellers run and grow their businesses with its integrated ecosystem of commerce solutions, business software, and banking services. With Cash App, anyone can easily send, spend, or invest their money in stocks or Bitcoin. Spiral (formerly Square Crypto) builds and funds free, open-source Bitcoin projects. Artists use TIDAL to help them succeed as entrepreneurs and connect more deeply with fans. TBD is building an open developer platform to make it easier to access Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies without having to go through an institution.

While there is no specific deadline to apply for this role, on average, U.S. open roles are posted for 70 days before being filled by a successful candidate.