Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Financial Crimes, Cash App

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 Financial Crimes Technology team at Cash App detects and reports illegal and suspicious activity on Cash App. We work globally with partners in Product, Counsel and Engineering to ensure we are providing a safe user experience for our customers while minimizing or eliminating bad activity on our platform

We are leveraging Generative AI (specifically Large Language Models) and Machine Learning as an integral part of our toolkit to fulfill our mission. As Cash App scales, we monitor hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions across traditional payment and blockchain networks. Our machine learning systems monitor and surface suspicious activity (money laundering, illegal activity and terms of service violations) for agent review. Our systems also proactively block payments in real time where appropriate. Now, we are also leveraging generative AI technologies to improve agent workflow and case review tools; by adding features that accelerate agent productivity and enable them to make faster, more informed and accurate decisions.

This is a new and significant opportunity to rethink and optimize Financial Crimes Operations at CashApp scale. This is an IC role, but the Staff level has significant leadership responsibilities that include owning, and driving strategic roadmaps & priorities to completion by collaborating with relevant cross functional stakeholders.

You Will

• Design, build, integrate and enhance batch inference services and tooling that support our LLM Copilot and Autopilot use cases
• Unblock the modelers on the team with the infrastructure/tools necessary for development & production work including solving MLOps, data access, security and scalability issues
• Develop prototypes and partner with modelers to encourage adoption of new tools and technologies and proactively identify and plan for future needs of our modelers
• Lead by example by applying AI/ML and engineering best practices
• Partner closely with Financial Crimes, AI/ML Platform and Product Engineering teams across Cash App and Block

You Have

• 5+ years of combined Machine Learning and Engineering industry experience (full stack ML experience is strongly preferred)
• A Masters or advanced degree in computer science, data science, operations research, applied math, stats, physics, or a related technical field
• Familiarity with Linux/OS X command line, version control software (git), and general software development principles with a machine learning software development life-cycle orientation
• Experience working with product, business, and engineering to prioritize, scope, design, and deploy ML models
• Familiarity with Python computing stack, MySQL, Snowflake, Airflow, Java/Go
• Hosted models for inference on public clouds like GCP, AWS and/or built micro-services to facilitate event based triggering, feature generation, model inference and downstream actioning

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