Staff Applied Machine Learning Engineer

Responsibilities

• Build and operate production ML systems that turn customer and product context into trusted signals, rankings, recommendations, and decision capabilities
• Design production data and signal contracts defining freshness, provenance, confidence, and calibration
• Own ranking, retrieval, recommendation, search, propensity, and next-best-action systems end to end
• Evaluate customer and business impact including trust, fairness, access, risk, and compliance
• Partner across product, growth, data, platform, and risk teams to translate goals into ML designs
• Use AI and agents to accelerate development, analysis, testing, and operations

Requirements

• 12+ years building and operating production software and ML systems
• Deep expertise in ranking/retrieval, recommendations, search, or customer intelligence
• Strong production ML judgment across feature pipelines, model serving, and experimentation
• Ability to evaluate impact regarding trust, fairness, and long-term engagement
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools with appropriate verification

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with semantic retrieval, embeddings, or two-tower models
• Knowledge of LLM-powered retrieval or decision systems
• Experience with experimentation, interleaving, or multi-objective optimization
• Experience building reusable feature/signal platforms or decision services

About the Company

Block builds simple, powerful tools that make progress towards an economy that’s truly open to all through brands like Square, Cash App, Afterpay, TIDAL, Bitkey, and Proto.