Principal Software Engineer, Product Server

Since we opened our doors in 2009, the world of commerce has evolved immensely, and so has Square. After enabling anyone to take payments and never miss a sale, we saw sellers stymied by disparate, outmoded products and tools that wouldn’t work together.

So we expanded into software and started building integrated, omnichannel solutions – to help sellers sell online, manage inventory, offer buy now, pay later functionality through Afterpay, book appointments, engage loyal buyers, and hire and pay staff. Across it all, we’ve embedded financial services tools at the point of sale, so merchants can access a business loan and manage their cash flow in one place. Afterpay furthers our goal to provide omnichannel tools that unlock meaningful value and growth, enabling sellers to capture the next generation shopper, increase order sizes, and compete at a larger scale.

Today, we are a partner to sellers of all sizes – large, enterprise-scale businesses with complex operations, sellers just starting, as well as merchants who began selling with Square and have grown larger over time. As our sellers grow, so do our solutions. There is a massive opportunity in front of us. We’re building a significant, meaningful, and lasting business, and we are helping sellers worldwide do the same.

The Role

Square recently consolidated some of its backend team across different business verticals under one centralized Product Server organization. The Product Server organization is a 300+ engineering team owning 150+ backend services in different technical stacks (Go, Java, Kotlin, Ruby, PHP). This is a transformational time to join our team as a Principal Software Engineer reporting into Product Server Lead to help establish the blueprint for building long term technical strategy, operation principles and engineering excellence culture impacting hundreds of engineers across the company!

You Will

• Help craft and drive long term technical strategy across different business verticals in Product Server to standardize and ensure operational excellence and efficiency of key production services
• Work with other senior engineers to set technical standards, make strategic technology choices and provide technical leadership on high impact projects
• Influence and coach a distributed team of engineers across the organization, evolving and instilling a culture of high quality and high velocity work 
• Facilitate alignment and clarity across teams on goals, outcomes, and timelines working across several engineering disciplines and leaders at Square.
• As needed, lead by example and dive into hands-on execution to solve for critical incidents and projects
• Work with your peers to influence Engineering across all of Square and Block

You Have

• 15+ years of software engineering experience building high performance distributed systems and operating them at scale
• 5+ years of experience in a technical leadership role leading project teams and setting technical direction
• 3+ years of experience working in a complex, matrixed organization involving cross-functional, and/or cross-business projects
• Proven record of successfully delivering large infrastructures or migrations (spanning 1+ year) and large teams from start to finish with strong collaboration, communication, and ownership Strong technical judgment and expertise with a focus on reliability, scalability, and correctness
• Exceptional communication, leadership, and influence skills
• Industry expert level know how in few of the key backend technologies we use:
  • Java, Kotlin, Ruby, PHP, Terraform, GraphQL
  • MySQL, Postgres, DynamoDB, Snowflake
  • Protocol Buffers, Kafka, Temporal IO, Envoy
  • AWS and other cloud platforms

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 an equal opportunity employer evaluating all employees and job applicants without regard to identity or any legally protected class. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, and always assess candidates on an individualized basis.

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.

Block will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and “fair chance” ordinances.