Staff iOS Accessibility Engineer, UI Systems

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, 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

UI Systems builds Square’s universal design system, Market. Market is deployed across all of Square’s seller-facing products on iOS, Android, and web. This includes our flagship products Point of Sale, Square Register, and Square Terminal. Put simply, this team builds the public face of Square.

We’re not only building a design system, though, our mandate is wider than that: UI Systems is also building the core UI frameworks and tools needed to make building, testing, and maintaining UI easy and fast at scale: We’re supporting almost 200 iOS engineers and 1500+ screens across Square’s iOS teams. UI Systems’ accessibility squad (where this role will live!) also supports accessibility needs across Square’s products and surfaces.

Why? Ensuring a consistent experience across products at scale is hard. At Square, we value great and consistent design – UI Systems is here to ensure that Square’s customers and Square engineers alike have a delightful and consistent experience when working with, or working on our products – no matter who built them.

Our design system is built with Blueprint and Listable, our open source declarative UI frameworks. We also heavily leverage Square’s Workflow state management framework. We’re also working on a ground-up rebuild of the design system in SwiftUI, scheduled to ship in early 2025. We’re really excited to offer SwiftUI to engineers at Square, and believe that this will be one of the largest deployments of SwiftUI in the industry – both in terms of the scale of the design system, and the scale of Square’s products.

As an engineer on the UI Systems team, you’ll be expected to partner closely with our design team to inform and deliver components and tools that help Square’s product engineers work faster, while ensuring a quality experience for Square’s sellers. You’ll also function as a translator of sorts – identifying needs and missing pieces and bringing them to UI Systems to push the entire design system forward. We also work closely with peer engineering teams like Mobile Foundation and Mobile Performance & Reliability, ensuring a reliable, performant, observable, and accessible toolkit across all layers of the stack.

As a staff engineer on UI Systems iOS, you’ll work closely with UI Systems leads, and leads (both technical leads and people leads) across Square to set technical direction, set team priorities, and overall evangelize the work of UI Systems and our Accessibility squad.

Finally, you will also be expected to build and maintain relationships with other senior mobile engineers, both within our team, and across all of our customer and peer teams to stay ahead of potential issues and understand upcoming needs. A key part of UI Systems’ job is to understand the current state of mobile development at Square, empathizing with the pain points of our customer teams, and working across platform teams to solve these issues – our team works with others to “get to yes” – we want to be an enabler, not a blocker.

You Will

• Build the core UI frameworks and design tooling needed to deploy, maintain, and test our design system at scale (we have 1500+ screens across our products). As a staff engineer on the accessibility squad, you’ll do this with a particular focus on accessibility of all kinds.
• Work closely with designers on UI systems, and across Square, to build a scalable and accessible design system for our mobile apps. This includes everything from simple UI elements like buttons up to custom navigation stacks and hierarchies and whatever is needed between.
• Work with all engineers on UI systems across Android, iOS, and web to ensure we’re building in a consistent and cohesive way on all three platforms. We’re aiming for consistency in APIs across platforms when possible.
• Embed with Square’s product teams to evangelize and adopt our design system, core frameworks, accessibility, and design tools.
• Provide courteous, timely support to product engineers building with the design system, answering their questions, and building missing pieces to unblock and support their needs. Accessibility in particular is a new focus area for us in 2024, and so we have a lot of work to do to infuse it into the engineering and design culture at all levels!

You Have

• 5+ years experience working with Apple’s accessibility technologies, as well as general knowledge of mobile accessibility expectations and the WCAG set of standards.
• 8+ years iOS development experience, deep UIKit experience is a must.
• Some SwiftUI experience or knowledge is expected.
• Experience with, understanding of, and passion for UI design principles.
• Experience building design systems or UI frameworks at medium to large scale.
• Experience building relationships across design and engineering.
• Experience leading through influence across engineers.
• Experience as a technical lead / DRI for a small to medium sized team.
• Note: We are a process-light team – you must be independent, have a strong bias towards action, and be a self-starter. We use processes to help us, not to constrain us. 

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.