Staff Machine Learning Engineer, 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

Block is organized into business groups, each with dedicated product and engineering teams. Our team plays a vital role in supporting these groups by delivering AI-powered solutions that directly benefit our customers and drive business growth. We are committed to building impactful products that solve meaningful problems, leveraging AI to create practical value across the company with direct impact to topline company revenue.

We are looking for an enthusiastic and experienced Machine Learning Engineer to join our team to build AI products. In this role, you will collaborate closely with teams across Block to understand their challenges and opportunities. You'll have the opportunity to work across the full development stack and set product strategy. You'll design, develop, and launch AI-driven tools and applications that address real customer needs, working in an environment that values creativity, experimentation, and practical problem solving.

You will partner with internal and external stakeholders to deliver highly visible solutions, staying at the forefront of AI advancements to ensure our products remain innovative and effective. As a trusted advisor, you'll help guide teams in harnessing AI, identifying new possibilities, and driving product direction that leads to lasting impact.

This is a unique opportunity to become a leading expert in AI at Block. You'll work on projects that transform the way we build products and serve our customers. We welcome individuals who are passionate about building for the real world, embracing pragmatic approaches, and seeing challenges from fresh, nontraditional viewpoints.

You Will

• Leverage AI to automate workflows and deliver new AI-powered product experiences
• Develop scalable AI systems and platforms
• 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 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
• Support the adoption of AI best practices across the company by providing guidance and sharing expertise

You Have

• 12+ years of experience in training and deploying ML models, developing ML software, and shipping customer-facing ML products.
• 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.
• Ruthless pragmatism when solving new and unconventional problems
• 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 main customers are internal developers and products.
• Ability to produce production-quality code and services incorporating testing, evaluation, monitoring as well as the ability to quickly adapt to a new domain, hack MVP's, and iterate to improve product.
• 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 will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and “fair chance” ordinances.

We believe