Software Engineer, Cash Availability Datastores

It all started with an idea at Block in 2013. Initially built to take the pain out of peer-to-peer payments, Cash App has gone from a simple product with a single purpose to a dynamic ecosystem, developing unique financial products, including Afterpay/Clearpay, to provide a better way to send, spend, invest, borrow and save to our 50+ million monthly active customers. We want to redefine the world’s relationship with money to make it more relatable, instantly available, and universally accessible.

Today, Cash App has thousands of employees working globally across office and remote locations, with a culture geared toward innovation, collaboration and impact. We’ve been a distributed team since day one, and many of our roles can be done remotely from the countries where Cash App operates. No matter the location, we tailor our experience to ensure our employees are creative, productive, and happy.

The Role

The Availability Datastores engineering team is responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure that powers some of the largest databases in Block.  Our mission is to provide scalable relational databases to engineers that need the speed and power of a SQL-based datastore, and to do so in a way that's a joy to work with on a day-to-day basis. We primarily work with a vendor called PlanetScale to provide a sharded version of MySQL called Vitess to internal customers that have huge relational datasets. In this capacity we work with the vendor and internal customers to arrive at the right solutions for their services, as well as providing support tooling to make the work of interacting with the database easier. Our focus is on ensuring that engineers are using the appropriate amount of resources to maximum effect, getting the benefits of scalable SQL while keeping the developer experience as close to stock MySQL as possible.

You Will

• Serve as the key point of contact for migration and scaling needs of teams using the PlanetScale platform
• Write tooling to smooth the developer experience of Block engineers utilizing a sharded database
• Work closely with Block engineers to migrate their services off of Aurora or DynamoDB to Vitess
• Build out efficient archiving tooling to stow old data in cold storage and rehydrate when needed
• Design and develop game day failure testing and load testing of the entire database stack to ensure we always handle outages as gracefully as possible
  
  

You Have

• 6+ years of software engineering experience building high performance distributed systems and operating them at scale
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• Boundless curiosity, persistence and a desire to get things done
• Strong communication skills
• Demonstrated technical initiative on previous projects is a plus
   

Technologies We Use and Teach

• Kotlin, Modern Java (11+), Go
• HTTP, JSON, gRPC, and Protocol Buffers
• MySQL / Vitess
• Terraform, Container services such as Kubernetes, Istio/Envoy
• Amazon Web Services

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.