Senior Build Engineer, Developer Tools

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

The Backend Build Team, part of the OCTO Developer Experience org, ensures that Block engineers have a top notch codebase and build experience where they can introduce changes fast, easily and with confidence. You will help us increase build speeds and reliability across the board for all supported languages, thereby elevating Block developer experience to the top tier in the tech industry. 

You Will

• Use metrics, customer interviews, pairing, surveys, and more to understand the daily friction points our customers face.
• Learn about build technologies and use your skill to optimize build graphs
• Identify bottlenecks in the development experience and optimize pull request workflows.
• Build/Evaluate new tools to meet our customers’ needs and reduce their toil.
• Communicate technical designs in writing and in person to multiple technical audiences.
• Undertake migrations to eliminate technical debt and to remove common bottlenecks holding up internal teams.
• Support users of our tools (during our on-call rotation).
• Grow your career in an engaged and creative engineering community that ships scalable tools and infrastructure.

You Have

• A computer science or engineering undergraduate degree or equivalent experience, including hands-on software development experience.
• Experience leading impactful, public and internal facing product features that have successfully been delivered to customers.
• Experience developing in at least one of Kotlin, Java, Python, Go, Ruby.
• Strong verbal and nonverbal communication skills. You’re adept at understanding complex technical concepts and helping cross-functional teams make decisions to move forward as well as communicating those decisions up.
• Interest in working across multiple technical domains, including microservices, lambdas, GenAI and CLIs.
• Interest in build systems, dependency management and graph optimizations.

Technologies We Use and Teach

• Languages: Kotlin, Java, Go, Ruby, Bash
• Operating Systems: Linux, macOS
• Other: Bazel, Gradle, Docker, AWS Lambdas, Kubernetes, GenAI

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.