Principal Engineer, AI Systems

Block builds simple, powerful tools that make progress towards an economy that's truly open to all.
Each of our brands unlocks different aspects of the economy for more people. Square makes commerce and financial services accessible to sellers. Cash App is the easy way to spend, send, and store money. Afterpay is transforming the way customers manage their spending over time. TIDAL is a music platform that empowers artists to thrive as entrepreneurs. Bitkey is a simple self-custody wallet built for bitcoin. Proto is a suite of bitcoin mining products and services. Together, we're helping build a financial system that is open to everyone. Join us.
The Role
Block is building toward one of the most ambitious technical visions in our history: an AGI-enabled entity that fundamentally transforms how we deliver economic empowerment. We're assembling a world-class team of AI experts to design and ship autonomous agents and agentic workflows that operate across Square, Cash App, and the broader Block ecosystem. This work is about creating solutions-you'll be building AI that acts, decides, and completes real tasks for real users from across all of Block's business functions. As a Principal Engineer, you'll join as a senior individual contributor with significant technical leadership responsibilities.
You Will

• Ship, architect, build, and own end-to-end delivery of autonomous agents and agentic workflows that deliver real business value for Block, ensuring reliability, safety, and performance at scale
• Design agent orchestration systems including planning, tool use, memory, evaluation, and multi-agent coordination at production scale
• Integrate and optimize frontier LLMs into agent architectures, making decisions on model selection, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and context retrieval strategies
• Drive deeper model optimization work (fine-tuning, distillation, RLHF) where it unlocks agent capability or efficiency
• Lead detailed technical planning by breaking down ambitious objectives into concrete, sequenced tasks with clear ownership and execution paths
• Provide technical mentorship and guidance to engineers across experience levels, elevating team capabilities through code review, pairing, and knowledge sharing
• Partner closely with technical and non-technical stakeholders to translate business objectives into agent-powered product experiences
• Keep Block at the frontier by continuously evaluating emerging AI capabilities and making pragmatic tradeoffs across model performance, latency, cost, and user experience
• Foster a culture of technical excellence, high-quality delivery, rapid experimentation, and learning within your team and beyond

You Have

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering or machine learning, with recent professional experience building autonomous agents or agentic workflows in production
• Deep experience building autonomous agents or agentic workflows in production environments-not just prototypes or demos
• Fluency in the core primitives of agentic systems: context management, planning, tool use, memory, evaluation, and multi-step reasoning
• Experience bringing frontier LLM capabilities into production products, with hands-on experience in prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, and model optimization
• A track record of taking AI-powered products from zero to scale in fast-paced, product-driven environments, with the judgment that comes from operating in production
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with the ability to write production-quality code and make sound architectural decisions
• Experience providing technical leadership within teams-you've shaped technical direction, driven execution, and elevated others
• Product-minded engineering approach-you think in terms of user outcomes, not just model metrics
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with ability to build alignment across engineering, product, and design
• Comfort navigating extreme ambiguity in a domain that's evolving weekly
• Alignment with Block's mission of economic empowerment and using technology to create access and opportunity

Bonus Points For

• Experience at leading AI organizations with a track record of translating research into production agent systems
• Background building or scaling agentic products at startups (including early-stage or pivoting companies)
• Experience with model fine-tuning, distillation, or RLHF to improve agent performance
• Familiarity with agent evaluation, safety, and alignment challenges in production contexts

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.
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.
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.
Zone A:
$319,000 - $478,600 USD
Zone B:
$319,000 - $478,600 USD
Zone C:
$319,000 - $478,600 USD
Zone D:
$319,000 - $478,600 USD
Application Guidelines
Candidates may submit up to 9 active applications within a 60-day period. Reapplications to the same role are accepted 90 days after a previous application has been reviewed.
Use of AI in Our Hiring Process
We may use automated AI tools to evaluate job applications for efficiency and consistency. These tools comply with local regulations, including bias audits, and we handle all personal data in accordance with state and local privacy laws.
Contact us here with hiring practice or data usage questions.
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 offering. Check out our other benefits at Block.
Block, Inc. (NYSE: XYZ) builds technology to increase access to the global economy. Each of our brands unlocks different aspects of the economy for more people. Square makes commerce and financial services accessible to sellers. Cash App is the easy way to spend, send, and store money. Afterpay is transforming the way customers manage their spending over time. TIDAL is a music platform that empowers artists to thrive as entrepreneurs. Bitkey is a simple self-custody wallet built for bitcoin. Proto is a suite of bitcoin mining products and services. Together, we're helping build a financial system that is open to everyone.