Staff Software Engineer - Access, Trust

It all started with an idea at Block in 2013. Initially built to take the pain out of peer-to-peer payments, Cash App has gone from a simple product with a single purpose to a dynamic ecosystem, developing unique financial products, including Afterpay/Clearpay, to provide a better way to send, spend, invest, borrow and save to our 57 million monthly active customers. We want to redefine the world’s relationship with money to make it more relatable, instantly available, and universally accessible.

Today, Cash App has thousands of employees working globally across office and remote locations, with a culture geared toward innovation, collaboration and impact. We’ve been a distributed team since day one, and many of our roles can be done remotely from the countries where Cash App operates. No matter the location, we tailor our experience to ensure our employees are creative, productive, and happy.

Check out our locations, benefits, and more at cash.app/careers.

Cash App has grown rapidly to tens of millions of users moving billions of dollars daily. To support this incredible growth, we are building out the Access organization. Our mission is to maximize trust and expand access to our ecosystem, ensuring that every user feels safe and secure while using our platform. We play a critical role in providing financial access to customers who are underserved by traditional financial institutions, and we are committed to creating a seamless and secure user experience.

Access is the cornerstone of Cash App, responsible for managing authentication, sessions, authorization, and protecting against account takeover and inauthentic logins. We aim to build a reliable technical foundation and intuitive customer-facing features that enable authentic customers to consistently access their accounts while safeguarding them from unauthorized access and inauthentic actors.

About the teams on Access:

Authentication: The Access Authentication team handles all things authentication at Cash App. We ensure that our millions of customers can conveniently access their finances safely and reliably. In addition to implementing and refining the core authentication customer experiences, like the customer login and account recovery flows, we support Cash App's expansion into new use cases with reliable, well-designed access control primitives that reduce customer exposure to risk and fraud.

Account Security: We ensure that our millions of customers can access Cash App safely and reliably while minimizing barriers to entry to the financial system. We support Cash App’s expansion into new use cases and markets with reliable, well-designed control primitives that empower engineering teams across the company. This team helps in identifying fraudulent activities and bot attacks to mitigate hacking and prevent account compromise. The team builds tools to collect fraudulent signals, detect fraud patterns, and automatically mitigate attacks. We provide security features and assets to protect customer accounts.

Account Foundations: The Account Foundations team focuses on evolving our account model and account holder structure, fosters coherent relationship modeling between them and enables seamless access management.  This allows customers to manage multiple accounts and allow access to other accounts. We ensure the accounts model and infrastructure scale with emerging product changes, maintaining a high level of account security and clear, intuitive user experiences, directly contributing to Cash App's business direction.

As a member of the Cash App Trust Access team, you will:

• Design, build, and operate the APIs and services that power Cash App's authentication flows
• Contribute to the safety of our customers by ensuring meaningful control over account security
• Evolve our architecture to scale with growth in customers and developers, working across large monolith codebases and microservices
• Collaborate with product management and design to develop new, high-impact experiences
• Build incrementally, test everything, and deploy daily
• Work on the live support rotation to keep our systems running well

You Have:

• 8+ years experience building and operating quality software
• Technical initiative and leadership on previous projects
• Growth mindset and a healthy comfort with ambiguity
• Strong communication skills and customer empathy
• Experience contributing to the growth of our development capabilities through leading, mentoring and supporting fellow engineers

Even better:

• Experience with or interest in authN/authZ standards or product security
• Experience working in large codebases and breaking apart monoliths
• Experience working in a distributed team

Technologies we use and teach:

• Java, Kotlin, Golang
• HTTP, JSON, gRPC, Protocol Buffers
• MySQL, Hibernate, DynamoDB
• Kafka and event-driven architecture
• DataDog, Prometheus
• AWS, Kubernetes

This is a remote role.

#LI-Remote

Block takes a market-based approach to pay, and pay may vary depending on your location. U.S. locations are categorized into one of four zones based on a cost of labor index for that geographic area. The successful candidate’s starting pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. These ranges may be modified in the future.

Zone A: USD $198,000 - USD $297,000
Zone B: USD $188,100 - USD $282,100
Zone C: USD $178,200 - USD $267,400
Zone D: USD $168,300 - USD $252,500

To find a location’s zone designation, please refer to this resource. If a location of interest is not listed, please speak with a recruiter for additional information. 

Full-time employee benefits include the following:

• Healthcare coverage (Medical, Vision and Dental insurance)
• Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Account
• Retirement Plans including company match 
• Employee Stock Purchase Program
• Wellness programs, including access to mental health, 1:1 financial planners, and a monthly wellness allowance 
• Paid parental and caregiving leave
• Paid time off (including 12 paid holidays)
• Paid sick leave (1 hour per 26 hours worked (max 80 hours per calendar year to the extent legally permissible) for non-exempt employees and covered by our Flexible Time Off policy for exempt employees) 
• Learning and Development resources
• Paid Life insurance, AD&D, and disability benefits 

These benefits are further detailed in Block's policies. This role is also eligible to participate in Block's equity plan subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies, and may be eligible for a sign-on bonus. Sales roles may be eligible to participate in a commission plan subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies. Pay and benefits are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefit plans.

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 a proud equal opportunity employer. We work hard to evaluate all employees and job applicants consistently, without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class. 

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.

Block will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and “fair chance” ordinances. Because the material duties of this role involve direct or indirect access to sensitive personal or financial data, a criminal background check is required following a contingent offer of employment.

While there is no specific deadline to apply for this role, on average, U.S. open roles are posted for 70 days before being filled by a successful candidate.

Block, Inc. (NYSE: SQ) is a global technology company with a focus on financial services. Made up of Square, Cash App, Spiral, TIDAL, and TBD, we build tools to help more people access the economy. Square helps sellers run and grow their businesses with its integrated ecosystem of commerce solutions, business software, and banking services. With Cash App, anyone can easily send, spend, or invest their money in stocks or Bitcoin. Spiral (formerly Square Crypto) builds and funds free, open-source Bitcoin projects. Artists use TIDAL to help them succeed as entrepreneurs and connect more deeply with fans. TBD is building an open developer platform to make it easier to access Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies without having to go through an institution.