Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Banking

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

As part of the Machine Learning Engineering Banking team, you will play a critical part in utilizing machine learning methods and systems to reduce the prevalence of fraudulent behavior within Cash’s banking products and ecosystem. Our primary responsibility is fortifying our first line of defense against bad actors attempting to extract money from our customers or from the company. Areas that we own include Cash Card, Deposits and Withdrawals, and Dispute Claim Investigations. When we are successful, we build more trust within our customer base and allow for the continued expansion of safe products to give more economic empowerment to our customers. By leveraging machine learning, we aim to ensure that everyone has equal access to the financial services they require, irrespective of their background or financial history. 

Specifically this role focuses on using machine learning to develop risk-based experiences that increases access for good customers, prevention of fraudulent transactions and activity on customer accounts, and ensuring that customers can trust that Cash App is a safe place to store their hard earned funds.

Our team is continuing to grow and we’re looking for Engineers with experience developing ML pipelines and infrastructure to build out the next-generation ML solutions to power use cases across the company. Across the team, we employ methods ranging from simple heuristics, Machine Learning models, and utilization of Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve our performance and services. We’re also excited to explore new directions with the team to continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

Our ML Engineers work in close collaboration with Data Scientists, ML Modelers and Software Engineers from across Cash App. Check out our Machine Learning / AI blog here!

You Will

• Design elegant ML pipelines and services as well as prototype new approaches and productionize solutions at scale for our 50+ million active users
• Create a world class platform for training, hosting and maintaining ML models 
• Apply ML and engineering best practices to shape how Cash App develops, tests and maintains ML-platform solutions
• Help design and execute our long-term Machine Learning strategy across Cash App

You Have

• 8+ years of experience in software development and demonstrated technical initiative and leadership on previous machine learning projects
• Curiosity and a passion for Cash App's mission of economic empowerment 
• Experience helping your teammates grow through mentorship and providing constructive feedback 
• A desire to be hands-on and help invent the future of AI
• The ability to work autonomously in the rapidly evolving world of ML
• Experience or knowledge in ML is helpful but not a prerequisite: if you are a solid software engineer, then we are happy to train you in the mysterious ways of ML

Technologies We Use and Teach

• Python, Java and Kotlin 
• Tensorflow and PyTorch 
• AWS, GCP, and Kubernetes
• MySQL, DynamoDB, Kafka, Apache Beam, Flink and Google DataFlow

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.