Senior Site Reliability Engineer

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

As a member of the SRE team, you will proactively and reactively improve the reliability of Block's platform and critical infrastructure. You are metrics-driven, systems-oriented, and focused on building distributed platforms that enable safe, scalable product development.

You will leverage and continuously improve AI-driven tooling and automation to enhance observability, accelerate incident detection and response, and reduce operational toil. This includes applying AI to incident analysis, alert tuning, and operational workflows.

You will participate in primary platform oncall (12 hours per day, one week every few weeks, depending on team size), supporting Block's most critical (Tier 0) services. In this role, you will lead incident command, coordinate mitigation, and drive effective escalation during high-severity events.

You Will

Build and extend platforms to improve system reliability

Work on team goals that encompass reliability for the entire company

Standardize reliability tools across multiple platforms and organizations

Triage, coordinate, and lead stabilization of sev 0–1 incidents

Serve as primary oncall, maintaining structured escalation paths and exercising leadership escalation

Drive platform-wide reliability improvements, shared operational tooling, and deploy-safety patterns

Use AI-driven systems to improve signal detection, reduce noise, and accelerate root cause analysis

Design and implement safe deployment patterns (progressive delivery, automated rollback, guardrails)

You Have

Drive to root cause systems with many moving parts and take the necessary steps to fix them

Demonstrated technical initiative and leadership on previous projects, especially those with a backend/platform focus

Familiarity with AI-driven tooling for observability, incident analysis, or automation

A mindset that naturally reaches for AI to accelerate problem-solving and reduce toil

Experience running production oncall for high-availability systems

Strong incident management skills — structured triage, mitigation under pressure, blameless postmortems

Fluency with CI/CD pipelines, progressive rollout strategies, and rollback automation

Monitoring observability expertise — building/tuning alerts for uptime, error rates, latency regression, and resource exhaustion

Ability to create and maintain evidence-based maturity assessments using trailing 90-day data windows.

Comfort with vendor/dependency management — maintaining validated escalation contacts reachable within ≤ 5 minutes.

Boundless curiosity, autonomy, and a strong sense of accountability

A strong desire to perform and grow as an engineer

5+ years of software development experience

Technologies We Use and Teach

Kotlin, Modern Java (11+)

HTTP, JSON, gRPC, and Protocol Buffers

MySQL / Vitess / DynamoDB

Event driven architectures

DataDog

LaunchDarkly

Terraform, Kubernetes, Istio/Envoy

Amazon Web Services

This program shifts Block from reactive incident handling to repeatable, system-wide reliability gains — fewer customer-visible incidents, faster response, higher product velocity, and lower burnout across the organization.

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 a proud equal opportunity employer. We work hard to evaluate all employees and job applicants consistently, based solely on the core competencies required of the role at hand, and without regard to any legally protected class. 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 an inclusive workplace? Check out our Inclusion Diversity page

Full-time employee benefits include the following:

Healthcare coverage (Medical, Vision and Dental insurance)

Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Account

Retirement Plans including company match

Employee Stock Purchase Program

Wellness programs, including access to mental health, 1:1 financial planners, and…