Staff Data Engineer, Advanced Insights & Modeling

Title: Staff Data Engineer, Advanced Insights & Modeling Location: Bay Area, CA, United States of America

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 50+ 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.

The Role

The Advanced Insights and Modeling (AIM) team is a high-impact, business-savvy group of builders: machine learning engineers, data scientists, data engineers, and business strategists who combine technical skills with deep product and financial expertise. We hold high standards, move fast, and own our models end to end. AIM runs on curiosity, bold thinking, and collaboration, and we keep the culture decidedly non-corporate. Teams across Block come to us when they need insight, speed, and real business impact.

AIM sits within Block’s Foundational organization and is sponsored directly by the CFO, but our mandate runs well beyond Finance. We own most of the measurement and predictive modeling at Block: forecasting across Cash App, Square, and Afterpay, customer lifetime value, marketing incrementality and spend optimization, sales pipeline and prospect value, and actives and network-effect measurement. Finance, Marketing, Sales, Product, and Risk all plan against numbers we produce. We also own the data foundations those models run on, and corporate functions including Finance, Accounting, Treasury, SFS, and Procurement increasingly come to us when they want to rethink how their work gets done with AI.

Automation across the enterprise. AIM leads Block’s Foundational Automation program, a CFO-sponsored effort to rebuild how Finance, Accounting, Treasury, SFS, and Procurement operate. Rather than layering AI on top of existing workflows, we rebuild the underlying data and process layer so that agents can take on the work itself: monitoring pipelines, reconciling positions, triaging exceptions, and escalating only the decisions that need a person. In Treasury, you will define and build the data systems and controls that make this automation reliable.

The Treasury opportunity. Block moves money through hundreds of bank accounts across multiple legal entities, and Treasury’s view of that position today is stitched together from bank portals, a liquidity tool, portfolio accounting, and the general ledger, with the gaps closed by hand. No single system tells Treasury, in near real time, where every dollar sits and whether the books agree. You will build that system from the ground up.

Your mandate. You will own the technical direction and hands-on development of Treasury’s data foundation. Treasury manages Block’s own cash, liquidity, and investments across its businesses and legal entities. You will work directly with Treasury and Accounting to understand how they operate, identify what needs to change, and turn those needs into a technical roadmap.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role. You will make architecture and build-versus-buy recommendations, decide what to tackle first, and personally build and operate the core data systems. We’re looking for someone who can take an open-ended business problem through to a working solution, bringing clear recommendations when decisions need broader agreement.

Treasury is the first function to get this treatment. The architecture, controls, and operating model you establish will become the template for Accounting, Procurement, and the rest of Foundational.

Your initial priorities. You will shape the roadmap around three connected needs:

• A trusted liquidity position. Bring bank, custodian, portfolio accounting, and general ledger data into a reliable entity-level view in Snowflake. Define the architecture, reconciliation approach, and data quality controls, then build the pipelines and data models.
• A foundation for forecasting. Partner with AIM’s ML engineers to establish the datasets, features, and data contracts for predicting cash inflows and outflows. Own the underlying data systems through production.
• A clear direction for Treasury systems. Lead the technical recommendation for Block’s 2027 Treasury Management System decision: what to build, what to buy, and how the pieces should fit together. Define the integration and migration approach for the chosen direction.

You will determine the sequencing and trade-offs with Treasury and AIM.

Success means Treasury uses and trusts the systems you build, forecasting has reliable inputs, and manual reconciliation and investigation require less effort. Your initial focus is Treasury. Over time, the role can expand within across AIM’s broader portfolio, including forecasting infrastructure, customer-level data products, and GTM measurement. You Will

• Own Treasury’s data architecture and technical roadmap. Work directly with Treasury and Accounting to establish requirements, resolve competing needs, and prioritize what to build, buy, defer, or retire.
• Personally design, build, and operate the Treasury liquidity datamart in Snowflake, including source integrations, data models, reconciliation logic, and data contracts.
• Partner with AIM’s ML engineers on liquidity forecasting, building and maintaining the reliable datasets and pipelines those models depend on.
• Lead the technical recommendation for Treasury’s TMS build-versus-buy decision, including vendor evaluation, target architecture, and the integration and migration approach.
• Own production reliability and controls, including data quality, lineage, access, recovery, and on-call. Build automation, including AI agents where appropriate, to reduce manual monitoring and investigation while preserving necessary human review.
• Own delivery through adoption. Establish success measures with Treasury and improve the systems based on their reliability, use in daily decisions, and reduction in manual work.

You Have

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering, or a combination of software and data engineering, with substantial recent experience personally building and operating production data systems.
• Deep expertise in SQL, Python, and dbt, and experience with Snowflake or a comparable cloud data warehouse.
• Strong data architecture and modeling skills, including schema design, dimensional modeling, and integrating multiple source systems. Experience designing reconciliation, data quality, lineage, and access controls.
• Experience operating business-critical pipelines, including orchestration with tools such as Airflow or Prefect, dependency management, monitoring, incident response, and recovery.
• A track record of independently turning ambiguous business problems into production systems, setting technical direction, making architecture and build-versus-buy decisions, and personally implementing solutions through adoption.
• Experience working directly with senior business partners, challenging assumptions, resolving competing requirements, and explaining technical recommendations in business terms.

Particularly valuable

• Experience with financial, Treasury, or general ledger data, especially cash positions, transaction reconciliation, and multi-entity reporting.
• Experience building datasets and data contracts for production ML models or forecasting systems.
• Experience building workflow automation, including production AI agents with appropriate validation and human review.

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.