People Intelligence Architect

About the role

This role at Block focuses on developing and maintaining a robust people data ecosystem. The architect will be responsible for designing and building data pipelines that integrate information from various HR systems, ensuring data quality, lineage, privacy, and governance. This involves working with sensitive workforce data to create a trustworthy and reliable foundation for analytics.

A core part of the position involves applying data science principles to build predictive and diagnostic models. These models will address critical areas such as attrition, hiring funnel health, organizational network analysis, and compensation equity. The architect will translate complex people-related questions into rigorous analyses and communicate findings to leadership to support data-driven decision-making.

The role also emphasizes the design and deployment of AI agents and automations to operationalize insights. This includes establishing guardrails and evaluation processes for agentic systems to ensure their safety and trustworthiness when handling sensitive data. The architect will own the overall architecture, continuously evolving it to integrate pipelines, models, and AI agents into a coherent system.

The annual salary for this role ranges from $108,200 to $202,800.

Skills that matter here

• data engineering: This role requires designing, building, and maintaining reliable data pipelines to unify people data from various HR systems.
• data science: The architect will build predictive and diagnostic models for areas like attrition and hiring, applying statistics and machine learning.
• people analytics: The position involves translating ambiguous people questions into defensible analyses and turning results into actionable insights for leaders.
• agentic AI: The role includes designing and deploying AI agents and automations to operationalize insights, monitor signals, and generate reports.
• SQL: Building data pipelines will involve proven experience with SQL for data manipulation and querying.
• Python: The role requires experience with Python for building data pipelines and developing data science models.

Who this role suits

• Someone with 8+ years of relevant experience in data engineering and data science.
• An individual who understands the sensitivity and ethical considerations of people/HR data.
• A systems thinker who can connect various components and design for an entire system.
• A strong communicator capable of explaining technical concepts to both executives and engineers.

From the employer

You Will

• Design, build, and maintain reliable data pipelines that unify people data across HRIS, ATS, performance, compensation, and engagement systems.
• Model data for analytics and ML use, with a focus on quality, lineage, privacy, and governance of sensitive workforce data.
• Build predictive and diagnostic models (attrition, hiring funnel health, org network analysis, compensation equity, workforce planning).
• Translate ambiguous people questions into rigorous, defensible analyses — and translate results back into decisions leaders can act on.
• Partner on our semi-annual employee engagement survey — from instrument design and data collection to analysis, driver identification, and turning results into actionable insight for leaders.
• Design and deploy AI agents and automations that operationalize insight: monitoring signals, generating reports, drafting recommendations, and triggering workflows without manual effort.
• Establish the guardrails, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop patterns that make agentic systems safe and trustworthy on sensitive data.
• Own the architecture that ties pipelines, models, and agents into one coherent system — and continuously evolve it as tools and needs change.
• Set the technical direction and standards for People data and AI, and raise the bar through code review, design docs, and mentorship of peers (leading by influence, not by managing a team).
• Partner with People, Data Platform, Security, and Legal to ensure the system is compliant, scalable, and genuinely useful.

You Have

• 8+ years of relevant experience.
• Proven experience building data pipelines (SQL, Python, dbt/Airflow or similar, cloud data warehouses).
• Solid data science foundation — statistics, ML, experiment design, and the judgment to know when a simple model beats a complex one.
• Working knowledge of people/HR data and the sensitivity, ethics, and nuance it demands.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and agentic frameworks — building automations, prompts, tool-use, and evaluation loops.
• Strong systems thinking: you see how components connect and design for the whole, not just the part in front of you.
• Excellent communication — you can explain a model to an executive and a workflow to an engineer.

Why This Role is Different

• Most companies split this work across three or four people who rarely talk to each other — an engineer who builds pipes, an analyst who makes charts, and a data scientist who ships models into a void. You'll own the whole system, and use agentic AI to make it more than the sum of its parts. This is a role for a senior builder who wants deep technical ownership and impact without stepping off the tools to manage a team.
• Every benefit we offer is designed with one goal: empowering you to do the best work of your career while building the life you want. Remote work, medical insurance, flexible time off, retirement savings plans, and modern family planning are just some of our offerings.