Description
Block builds simple, powerful tools that make progress towards an economy that’s truly open to all.
The Role Product Platform Engineering builds and unifies the foundational systems Block engineers use to create, ship, and operate products. Within Product Platform Engineering, the Data Stores team builds the database and storage platforms that help engineering teams manage data safely, reliably, and efficiently.
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer with experience in databases and a generalist mindset. You will build new database platform capabilities, improve the systems engineers depend on every day, and work across backend services, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling.
Responsibilities:
- Design, build, and operate database and storage platform software that helps Block engineers build reliable products.
- Build services, APIs, and developer tools that automate database provisioning, schema changes, data migrations, upgrades, and other lifecycle operations.
- Solve database scaling and performance problems while protecting data correctness, durability, and availability.
- Work across database behavior, application code, distributed systems, networking, and cloud infrastructure to understand problems and deliver pragmatic solutions.
- Partner with engineering teams on schema design, query patterns, and platform adoption, turning recurring challenges into reusable capabilities.
- Help unify and modernize existing data store platforms, reducing operational toil and making safe practices the default.
- Lead technical projects from problem framing through implementation, testing, rollout, and operational ownership, including on-call participation and incident response.
- Make thoughtful tradeoffs between performance, reliability, cost, maintainability, and developer experience.
- Use AI tools to accelerate development and system understanding, while applying careful review, testing, and engineering judgment.
- Contribute to a culture that values curiosity, direct communication, early ownership, and learning through shipping.
Requirements:
- A minimum of 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 3 years and a Master’s degree; or equivalent work experience.
- Experience building and operating backend, infrastructure, or distributed systems, with meaningful experience working with relational databases in production.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to work across unfamiliar systems, codebases, and technical domains.
- A practical understanding of database concepts such as transactions, indexing, replication, schema evolution, and query performance.
- Experience in one or more areas such as database infrastructure, distributed storage, online migrations, cloud services, Kubernetes, observability, or developer tooling.
Technologies We Use and Teach:
- MySQL, AWS Aurora, Vitess, DynamoDB, Redis and ElastiCache, OpenSearch, AWS infrastructure, Kubernetes, backend services and APIs, observability tooling, Go, Java, Ruby, and AI-assisted engineering tools.
Benefits: Every benefit we offer is designed with one goal: empowering you to do the best work of your career while building the life you want. Remote work, medical insurance, flexible time off, retirement savings plans, and modern family planning are just some of our offering.