Senior Engineering Manager, Continuous Integration

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.

The Role

Block Continuous Integration team builds all the necessary infrastructure and tools to ensure Blocks Continuous Integration systems are fast, efficient and secure at scale. We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Continuous Integration (CI) team. The ideal candidate will have a strong technical background, proven leadership abilities, and a passion for driving CI best practices across the organization.

As the Senior Engineering Manager - Continuous Integration, you will be responsible for overseeing the development, implementation, and optimization of our CI processes, ensuring seamless integration and delivery of software products. You will own and scale the critical CI and underlying infrastructure that ensure the security, scalability and performance of our multiple CI systems.

The Continuous Integration team sits within the broader Block Developer Experience (DX) organization. Within Developer Experience we are passionate about improving engineering velocity and productivity, our CI systems are critical in achieving our vision. You will be responsible for CI build speed and ensuring a seamless CI experience for our 4000 engineer organisation.

Your team will focus on building robust, scalable, and secure infrastructure and tooling that powers key developer workflows. Your customers are Blocks 4000 engineers who work in our different Brands Square, CashApp, Tidal and Proto. The CI Systems you and your team maintain and grow will directly influence Block's ability to lift our development velocity, ensure operational excellence via high security and reliability and unlock new opportunities to our Brands customers by ensuring top notch product delivery.

We believe engineering management is a craft worthy of mastery, and we're looking for an engineering leader who shares our passion for building exceptional teams, systems, and businesses.

You Will

• Work within a globally distributed organization, with engineers in the United States, Australia, and across Europe
• Define your team's vision and roadmap by thoroughly understanding your customers' needs in collaboration with product management, security and adjacent engineering teams
• Build a world-class team by hiring exceptional talent, coaching and developing engineers, cultivating pragmatic engineering decision-making, and leveraging your technical expertise to constantly raise the bar.
• Partner closely with stakeholders across the Block Product Engineering and platform teams to thoroughly understand your customer's needs, and help define your team's vision and roadmap.
• Lead and participate in critical strategic, technical and operational discussions with leaders across the organization, company and external partners.
• Foster inclusiveness, trust, work-life balance, ownership, accountability, pragmatism, and decision making in the team
• Build a world-class team by hiring, motivating and retaining exceptional talent, coaching and developing engineers and managers, cultivating pragmatic engineering decision-making, and leveraging your technical expertise to constantly raise the bar
• Foster ownership, inclusiveness, accountability, pragmatism, and urgency in the team
• Ability to think outside of the box, you will apply innovative techniques to lift engineering velocity and in particular build processes and CI wait times.
• Own the design of scalable solutions to optimize CI health, efficiency and security.
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to junior engineers while driving cross-team collaboration and project leadership.
• Shape the Developer Experience Strategy at Block, influencing the design and architecture of mission-critical systems.
• Be at the forefront of developer innovation at Block, solving complex technical challenges at scale.

You Have

• 8+ years experience working on complex systems and delivering quality platforms
• 5+ years experience directly managing engineers and leading high-performing engineering teams, (including providing mentorship, feedback, and investing in the career growth of your team members)
• 1+ years managing other engineering managers/tech leads with reports
• A strategic mindset, and ability to think outside of the box.
• Ability to build strong rapport, trust, and influence with partners, vendors and stakeholders across Block
• A track record of building world class engineering teams that are highly-functional, collaborative and inclusive
• Leadership style with a people-first approach, can lead a conversation rather than dictate it, and are empathetic to conflicting viewpoints
• A customer first approach to problem solving. In Developer Experience, our customers are internal developers.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills with the ability to build strong relationships with cross-functional teams and both technical and non technical stakeholders.
• Boundless curiosity, persistence and a desire to get things done
• A history of healthy collaboration with product managers, engineers, and other engineering managers on developing roadmaps and executing against them
• Strong self-motivation to learn and grow
• Eagerness to share your own ideas, and openness to those of others
• A proven track record of exercising Platform as a Product mindset
• Lead with a people-first approach, can lead a conversation rather than dictate it, and are empathetic to dissenting viewpoints
• Have boundless curiosity, are driven by what they don't know and thrive in ambiguous environments.
• Excel at building world class engineering teams that are highly-functional, collaborative and inclusive.
• Build strong relationships with counterparts, both internally and externally
• Have a proven track record of working collaboratively across business partners to solve organizational wide problems.
• 2+ years of experience supporting and evolving CI (Continuous Integration) systems at scale
• Knowledge of build systems (Gradle/Bazel).

Technologies We Use and Teach

• Buildkite
• Languages: Java, Kotlin, Python, Go
• Operating Systems: Linux, MacOS,
• Other: AWS, Datadog, Kafka and event-driven architecture

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

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.

While there is no specific deadline to apply for this role, U.S. roles are typically open for an average of 55 days before being filled by a successful candidate. Please refer to the date listed at the top of this job page for when this role was first posted.