Software Engineer, Privacy Engineering

Block builds simple, powerful tools that make progress towards an economy that’s truly open to all.

Each of our brands unlocks different aspects of the economy for more people. Square makes commerce and financial services accessible to sellers. Cash App is the easy way to spend, send, and store money. Afterpay is transforming the way customers manage their spending over time. TIDAL is a music platform that empowers artists to thrive as entrepreneurs. Bitkey is a simple self-custody wallet built for bitcoin. Proto is a suite of bitcoin mining products and services. Together, we’re helping build a financial system that is open to everyone. Join us.

The Role

The Privacy Engineering team was formed to build tools and provide guidance for engineering teams to collect, store, and analyze data responsibly. Security and privacy are closely linked, but where security focuses on the meta level of protecting data and assets as a whole, privacy zooms in to focus on the type of information collected, stored, and used, and how that information may violate expectations or breach trust. Privacy Engineering provides technology and abstraction layers to enable the employees at Block to do their job while being customer-centric and minimizing risks to  the individual.

Privacy Engineering aims to be a resource and enabler of responsible data use, not a gatekeeper. Our technological solutions are designed to make the most common data use cases easier for the employees at Block, but not to restrict or exclude uncommon data use cases that are responsible and compliant. We promote privacy enhancing technologies. Working with other teams within security, engineering, and legal, we set reasonable expectations for anyone looking to build systems or products at Block.

As a Software Engineer on the team at Block, you will build internal products and infrastructure to protect Block’s customers’ privacy and collaborate with many teams across Block, including product engineering teams, privacy counsel, and teams within security and platform engineering.  You will be fully remote and report to the Data Foundations Engineering Manager.

You Will

• Design and develop services or infrastructure that support data privacy initiatives and consumer’s privacy rights across Block’s engineering ecosystem
• Help define the technological future of privacy at Block
• Collaborate with other engineering teams incorporating privacy engineering products into their engineered solutions
• Provide mentorship and reviews for engineering teams working with privacy technologies
• Contribute to the monitoring and stability of our team’s existing engineering solutions

Qualifications

You Have

• Minimum of 5 years of software engineering experience
• Experience writing quality scalable, robust and testable code
• Interest in learning new technologies or languages
• Experience cutting across services, infrastructure, or frameworks in novel ways to achieve security and privacy goals

Even Better:

• Experience designing novel yet robust security or privacy architectures
• Experience developing or maintaining services or processes to meet data governance needs
• Experience designing novel ways to understand and surface data flow, access control, and risk
• Experience explaining complex technical security or privacy concepts 

We use and teach:

• Java, Kotlin
• Linux, Terraform, AWS, MySQL

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.