Staff Software Engineer, Global Lending

Since we opened our doors in 2009, the world of commerce has evolved immensely, and so has Square. After enabling anyone to take payments and never miss a sale, we saw sellers stymied by disparate, outmoded products and tools that wouldn't work together.

So we expanded into software and started building integrated, omnichannel solutions – to help sellers sell online, manage inventory, offer buy now, pay later functionality, book appointments, engage loyal buyers, and hire and pay staff. Across it all, we've embedded financial services tools at the point of sale, so merchants can access a business loan and manage their cash flow in one place. Afterpay furthers our goal to provide omnichannel tools that unlock meaningful value and growth, enabling sellers to capture the next generation shopper, increase order sizes, and compete at a larger scale.

Today, we are a partner to sellers of all sizes – large, enterprise-scale businesses with complex operations, sellers just starting, as well as merchants who began selling with Square and have grown larger over time. As our sellers grow, so do our solutions. There is a massive opportunity in front of us. We're building a significant, meaningful, and lasting business, and we are helping sellers worldwide do the same.

The Role

Square Loans helps business owners access the capital they need to grow and manage their businesses. Our products provide simple, automated financing experiences built on Square's ecosystem, with billions of dollars in loans extended to sellers each year. Square Loans is also a major revenue driver for Square, making this work both technically complex and strategically important.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Global Lending team, you will operate as a trusted builder and problem-solver on the most complex and high-impact challenges facing our lending products. You'll go deep into technical, product, and architectural problems that are critical to the success of Square Loans, often where the right approach is not yet clear or where execution risk is high. A key part of your work will be rethinking our services and architecture to streamline development, improve maintainability, and accelerate delivery of new lending products. This position is deeply hands-on: you'll spend significant time in the code, shaping solutions directly while guiding the team toward long-term success. You'll help reduce technical risk, improve system health, and ensure our platform scales with the growing needs of sellers worldwide.

You Will

• Solve ambiguous, high-risk, and cross-team challenges in lending systems by working directly in the code and carrying solutions from implementation to resolution.
• Rethink and evolve lending services and architecture to streamline development and accelerate delivery of new products.
• Guide the long-term architecture of lending services while contributing hands-on to critical builds.
• Partner with engineering, product, design, and risk teams to de-risk and deliver initiatives with outsized business impact.
• Raise the technical bar through design reviews, architectural guidance, and by setting high standards for resilience and maintainability.
• Mentor engineers to grow their technical depth and leadership capabilities.
• Advocate for lending needs across Square, ensuring alignment while simplifying integration with other products.

You Have

• 12+ years of industry experience, with significant time designing and scaling large, complex systems
• A proven record of solving technically knotty problems with high ambiguity and risk
• Expertise in backend languages such as Java, Kotlin, or Ruby (and openness to learn others as needed)
• Experience guiding architecture for critical, high-throughput financial systems or equivalent domains while contributing hands-on to implementations.
• Strong ability to decompose ambiguous problems, propose pragmatic solutions, and execute to completion
• Experience influencing without direct authority, building trust across teams and functions
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially when working across engineering and non-technical partners

Technologies We Use and Teach

• Services: Java, Kotlin, Go, Ruby on Rails
• Data: MySQL, DynamoDB, Kafka, SQS
• Client: Ember.js, TypeScript, React Native
• Infra: Protocol Buffers, Temporal, Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS

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