Senior Engineering Manager, Applied AI Platform

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
All of Block's product services are organized into business units with their own product and engineering teams. Underneath, there's a connected platform team that supports the company. We are that platform. Within the platform, our team's focus is on using AI to accelerate productivity across the company, automating routine tasks like knowledge retrieval and code migrations. Our team works cross-functionally across Block's business units to deliver the most impactful tools to developers, and oftentimes working closely with teams to understand specific needs, and then generalizing those across Block.
We're looking for an enthusiastic and experienced Engineering Manager to lead our AI-driven initiatives, focused on enhancing engineering velocity. You will manage several squads of engineers collaborating with other internal teams, as well as a core squad working on a horizontal platform component. This unique opportunity will require you to build and maintain relationships with teams throughout Block and external vendors to collaborate on delivering highly visible and leveraged tools, as well as keep up with evolving AI technology. You'll provide strategic guidance to teams on what is possible with AI and help drive their AI product direction, in addition to overseeing the development of those applications. This is an exciting opportunity to transform the developer experience at Block and become a company expert in AI!
You Will

• Lead a team of ML engineers to apply AI to Block's internal use cases.
• Direct the development of a scalable AI platform to host both internal and external facing use cases.
• Define the future of AI at Block as a part of a newly formed company-wide initiative.
• Prioritize opportunities to improve internal productivity and engineering velocity by designing novel AI solutions to automate complex processes.
• Collaborate across diverse teams to develop AI solutions by understanding and generalizing the problems of cross-functional stakeholders.
• Lead AI innovation by building and open sourcing advanced frameworks and tools to enhance internal workflows and set industry standards.
• Drive alignment with Block's AI strategy by acting as a company AI expert and educating other teams about how to apply cutting-edge AI to their domains.

You Have

• 7+ years of experience in training and deploying ML models, ML software development, and building customer facing ML applications.
• Deep understanding of modern ML techniques (e.g. Large Language Models) and the ML lifecycle from data gathering, training, model evaluation, MLOps, and productionizing models.
• 3+ years of experience managing engineering teams.
• Entrepreneurial mindset, with demonstrated expertise taking data products 0 to 1 and a bent for agile development.
• A desire to understand our clients' needs in order to design tools and systems that solve our customer's problems.
• As a platform team, our customers are internal developers and products.
• Experience using any of the major cloud vendors for high scale production use cases.
• Strong communication skills (verbal and written) with technical and non-technical stakeholders

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 takes a market-based approach to pay, and pay may vary depending on your location. U.S locations are categorized into one of four zones based on a cost of labor index for that geographic area. The successful candidate's starting pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. These ranges may be modified in the future.
To find a location's zone designation, please refer to this resource . If a location of interest is not listed, please speak with a recruiter for additional information.
Zone A:
$239,600 - $359,400 USD
Zone B:
$239,600 - $359,400 USD
Zone C:
$239,600 - $359,400 USD
Zone D:
$239,600 - $359,400 USD
Block, Inc. (NYSE: SQ) is a global technology company with a focus on financial services. Made up of Square, Cash App, Spiral, TIDAL, and TBD, we build tools to help more people access the economy. Square helps sellers run and grow their businesses with its integrated ecosystem of commerce solutions, business software, and banking services. With Cash App, anyone can easily send, spend, or invest their money in stocks or Bitcoin. Spiral (formerly Square Crypto) builds and funds free, open-source Bitcoin projects. Artists use TIDAL to help them succeed as entrepreneurs and connect more deeply with fans. TBD is building an open developer platform to make it easier to access Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies without having to go through an institution.