Principal Engineer, AI Systems

Block builds simple, powerful tools that make progress towards an economy that's truly open to all.

Each of our brands unlocks different aspects of the economy for more people. Square makes commerce and financial services accessible to sellers. Cash App is the easy way to spend, send, and store money. Afterpay is transforming the way customers manage their spending over time. TIDAL is a music platform that empowers artists to thrive as entrepreneurs. Bitkey is a simple self-custody wallet built for bitcoin. Proto is a suite of bitcoin mining products and services. Together, we're helping build a financial system that is open to everyone. Join us.

The Role

Block is building toward one of the most ambitious technical visions in our history: an AGI-enabled entity that fundamentally transforms how we deliver economic empowerment. We're assembling a world-class team of AI experts to design and ship autonomous agents and agentic workflows that operate across Square, Cash App, and the broader Block ecosystem. This work is about creating solutions—you'll be building AI that acts, decides, and completes real tasks for real users from across all of Block's business functions. As a Principal Engineer, you'll join as a senior individual contributor with significant technical leadership responsibilities.

You Will

Ship, architect, build, and own end-to-end delivery of autonomous agents and agentic workflows that deliver real business value for Block, ensuring reliability, safety, and performance at scale

Design agent orchestration systems including planning, tool use, memory, evaluation, and multi-agent coordination at production scale

Integrate and optimize frontier LLMs into agent architectures, making decisions on model selection, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and context retrieval strategies

Drive deeper model optimization work (fine-tuning, distillation, RLHF) where it unlocks agent capability or efficiency

Lead detailed technical planning by breaking down ambitious objectives into concrete, sequenced tasks with clear ownership and execution paths

Provide technical mentorship and guidance to engineers across experience levels, elevating team capabilities through code review, pairing, and knowledge sharing

Partner closely with technical and non-technical stakeholders to translate business objectives into agent-powered product experiences

Keep Block at the frontier by continuously evaluating emerging AI capabilities and making pragmatic tradeoffs across model performance, latency, cost, and user experience

Foster a culture of technical excellence, high-quality delivery, rapid experimentation, and learning within your team and beyond

You Have

15+ years of experience in software engineering or machine learning, with recent professional experience building autonomous agents or agentic workflows in production

Deep experience building autonomous agents or agentic workflows in production environments—not just prototypes or demos

Fluency in the core primitives of agentic systems: context management, planning, tool use, memory, evaluation, and multi-step reasoning

Experience bringing frontier LLM capabilities into production products, with hands-on experience in prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, and model optimization

A track record of taking AI-powered products from zero to scale in fast-paced, product-driven environments, with the judgment that comes from operating in production

Strong software engineering fundamentals with the ability to write production-quality code and make sound architectural decisions

Experience providing technical leadership within teams—you've shaped technical direction, driven execution, and elevated others

Product-minded engineering approach—you think in terms of user outcomes, not just model metrics

Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with ability to build alignment across engineering, product, and design

Comfort navigating extreme ambiguity in a domain that's evolving weekly

Alignment with Block's mission of economic empowerment and using technology to create access and opportunity

Bonus Points For

Experience at leading AI organizations with a track record of translating research into production agent systems

Background building or scaling agentic products at startups (including early-stage or pivoting companies)

Experience with model fine-tuning, distillation, or RLHF to improve agent performance

Familiarity with agent evaluation, safety, and alignment challenges in production contexts

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 ch…