Senior Site Reliability Engineer

About the role

This Senior Site Reliability Engineer role at Block focuses on improving the reliability of the company's platform and critical infrastructure. The position involves both proactive and reactive measures, requiring a metrics-driven and systems-oriented approach. The goal is to build distributed platforms that support safe and scalable product development across the organization.

A key aspect of this role is leading incident management, including triaging and coordinating responses to severe incidents. The engineer will also serve in a primary on-call capacity, managing escalation paths and ensuring prompt resolution. Success in this position means driving platform-wide reliability improvements, developing shared operational tooling, and implementing secure deployment practices.

The role emphasizes leveraging AI-driven systems to enhance signal detection, minimize noise, and accelerate root cause analysis. This involves designing and implementing safe deployment patterns such as progressive delivery, automated rollbacks, and guardrails. The engineer will also be responsible for standardizing reliability tools across various platforms and teams within Block.

The listed salary for this role is $170,100 USD, which aligns with the Zone C compensation structure at Block.

Skills that matter here

• Kotlin: This role involves building and extending platforms, suggesting development work where Kotlin may be used.
• Kubernetes: Experience with Kubernetes is relevant for managing and orchestrating the distributed platforms this role aims to improve.
• Amazon Web Services: Familiarity with AWS indicates the cloud environment where much of Block's infrastructure likely resides.
• DataDog: This tool is used for monitoring and observability, which is crucial for building and tuning alerts for system health.
• Terraform: Terraform is used for infrastructure as code, which supports building and extending platforms in an automated way.
• Event driven architectures: Understanding event-driven architectures is important for working with distributed systems and improving their reliability.

Who this role suits

• Someone who is driven to thoroughly investigate complex system issues and implement lasting solutions.
• A candidate who has demonstrated leadership in backend or platform-focused projects.
• An individual comfortable with production on-call duties for high-availability systems and skilled in incident management under pressure.
• A person with a natural inclination to use AI for problem-solving and reducing manual effort, coupled with strong curiosity and accountability.

From the employer

• Build and extend platforms to improve system reliability
• Work on team goals that encompass reliability for the entire company
• Standardize reliability tools across multiple platforms and organizations
• Triage, coordinate, and lead stabilization of sev 0–1 incidents
• Serve as primary oncall, maintaining structured escalation paths and exercising leadership escalation
• Drive platform-wide reliability improvements, shared operational tooling, and deploy-safety patterns
• Use AI-driven systems to improve signal detection, reduce noise, and accelerate root cause analysis
• Design and implement safe deployment patterns (progressive delivery, automated rollback, guardrails)

• Drive to root cause systems with many moving parts and take the necessary steps to fix them
• Demonstrated technical initiative and leadership on previous projects, especially those with a backend/platform focus
• Familiarity with AI-driven tooling for observability, incident analysis, or automation
• A mindset that naturally reaches for AI to accelerate problem-solving and reduce toil
• Experience running production oncall for high-availability systems
• Strong incident management skills — structured triage, mitigation under pressure, blameless postmortems
• Fluency with CI/CD pipelines, progressive rollout strategies, and rollback automation
• Monitoring & observability expertise — building/tuning alerts for uptime, error rates, latency regression, and resource exhaustion
• Ability to create and maintain evidence-based maturity assessments using trailing 90-day data windows
• Comfort with vendor/dependency management — maintaining validated escalation contacts reachable within ≤ 5 minutes
• Boundless curiosity, autonomy, and a strong sense of accountability
• A strong desire to perform and grow as an engineer
• 5+ years of software development experience

• This program shifts Block from reactive incident handling to repeatable, system-wide reliability gains — fewer customer-visible incidents, faster response, higher product velocity, and lower burnout across the organization.
• 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 $189,000 - USD $283,600
• Zone B: USD $179,600 - USD $269,400
• Zone C: USD $170,100 - USD $255,100
• Zone D: USD $160,700 - USD $241,100