Staff Data Engineer, Compliance Engineering & Technology

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

The Compliance Engineering & Technology (CET) team at Block supports the detection and reporting of suspicious financial crimes activity across Cash App, Square, and Afterpay. We work globally with partners in business, engineering, counsel, and product to provide a safe user experience for our customers while minimizing and potentially eliminating bad activity on our platform.

You will report to the CET - Screening Engineering Manager, but work predominately alongside the CET - Data Engineering team. As a Data Engineer you will handle everything from data architecture and modeling to data pipeline tooling and dashboarding. You will enable other compliance teams to make impactful business decisions by laying the foundation of our large and unique datasets that span across multiple products. As a staff engineer, you will be helping bring the organization into a new level of consistency, helping create and evangelize best practices and standards for the wider organization.

You Will

• Stay up to date on the latest data engineering best practices, decide which are most applicable for our use cases, and guide and teach the data engineering team the relevant tools.


• Create scalable patterns and solutions that help our team design, develop, and manage scalable ETL pipelines to unblock new product launches.


• Lead the creation and optimization of existing data models and schemas on top of Block data including but not limited to eventing, customer level, and process level data.


• Build monitoring to assess the health of the team’s infrastructure as well as data quality and lineage.


• Participate in the data engineering team’s on-call rotation: monitor daily execution, diagnose and log issues, and fix business critical pipelines to ensure SLAs are met with internal stakeholders


• Work with non-technical partners and product teams to understand their needs, translate business requirements into applicable data requirements, and come up with automated end-to-end solutions.


• Standardize business and product metric definitions in curated and optimized datasets, and develop data dictionaries and other related documentation.


• Teach and encourage software engineer teams to self-serve by building tools that make it simpler and faster for them to do so.

You Have

• A minimum of 12 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 10 years and a Master’s degree; or equivalent experience.


• High proficiency in SQL


• Working experience with Python


• Databrick experience


• Experience designing medium-to-large data engineering solutions and responsible for the entire lifecycle of projects including scoping, design, development, testing, deployment, and documentation


• Experience with ETL scheduling technologies with dependency checking, such as Airflow or Prefect, as well as schema design and dimensional data modeling


• Experience with setting up data quality and data lineage monitoring


• Experience with financial crimes compliance systems, technologies, and processes is a big plus


• Experience driving decisions for AI initiatives / agent building is a big plus

Technologies We Use and Teach

• Snowflake


• Terraform


• Dbt


• Github


• Airflow


• Prefect


• Tableau

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 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.

While there is no specific deadline to apply for this role, U.S. roles are typically open for an average of 55 days before being filled by a successful candidate. Please refer to the date listed at the top of this job page for when this role was first posted.