Staff Software Engineer

Description:

Square, part of Block, Inc., is seeking a highly experienced Staff Backend Engineer to join its Activation and Engagement Server Team, which is a critical part of the Growth Product organization. This team focuses on helping sellers seamlessly move from signup to activation, first payment, and long-term engagement with Square’s products.

The role involves technical leadership combined with hands-on coding to build scalable, reliable backend services that power onboarding flows, engagement features, and automation across Square’s web, POS, and international platforms. The engineer will serve as the technical authority for distributed backend systems, driving architectural initiatives, leading organizational-level migrations, and establishing reliability and operational standards.

Key responsibilities include:

• Designing and building backend services for seller onboarding, engagement workflows, and critical seller experiences.

• Leading technical vision, architecture decisions, and large-scale platform transformations.

• Building scalable distributed systems handling millions of interactions across multiple platforms.

• Coaching and mentoring senior engineers and shaping engineering culture.

• Driving reliability practices, observability, and operational excellence across the organization.

• Collaborating across Growth Product and other engineering teams to align on strategy and technical execution.

Qualifications Required:

• 12+ years of backend engineering with expertise in Java and/or Kotlin.

• Proven experience in large-scale distributed systems architecture.

• Strong leadership experience in platform transformations, technical migrations, and architectural initiatives.

• Skilled in breaking down complex problems into actionable solutions.

• Experience mentoring engineers and fostering an inclusive culture.

• Expertise in AWS, Kubernetes, containerization, CI/CD, and cloud-scale automation.

• Domain experience in onboarding, user engagement, payments, or SaaS platforms.

• Familiarity with A/B testing frameworks, experimentation platforms, and workflow orchestration systems.

Technologies Used: Java (primary), Kotlin, gRPC, REST, Protocol Buffers, Guice, Hibernate, Optimizely, LaunchDarkly, JUnit, Mockito, Service mesh, Distributed tracing.

Compensation and Benefits:

• Salary range: 21966 – 32950 USD per month, based on skills and location zone.

• Remote work flexibility within the U.S.

• Comprehensive benefits including medical insurance, flexible time off, retirement savings plans, family planning support, and more.