Software Engineer, Justice Engineering

Block is one company built from many blocks, all united by the same purpose of economic empowerment. The blocks that form our foundational teams — People, Finance, Counsel, Hardware, Information Security, Platform Infrastructure Engineering, and more — provide support and guidance at the corporate level. They work across business groups and around the globe, spanning time zones and disciplines to develop inclusive People policies, forecast finances, give legal counsel, safeguard systems, nurture new initiatives, and more. Every challenge creates possibilities, and we need different perspectives to see them all. Bring yours to Block.

The Role

At Block, we strive to build the best products in the world — including the ones our customers never see. The Justice Engineering team builds the systems Block uses to meet its legal obligations to law enforcement, courts, and government agencies.

Every month, Block receives thousands of subpoenas, civil notices, tax levies, liens, and receiverships. Getting each one right matters in both directions: responding late or incompletely exposes Block to financial, criminal, and reputational penalties, while producing more data than a request calls for breaks the trust our customers place in us. Our services automate that work end to end — identifying the right customer from a fragment of data, assembling and securely delivering records, freezing and releasing accounts, moving money, and notifying customers — for the Counsel and Compliance teams who respond to these requests on Block's behalf.

As a full stack software engineer on Justice Engineering, you will design, build, and operate these services. We're a small team with a large surface area, so the scope is real: you'll own well-scoped features end to end — from design through testing, launch, and operation — across backend services, the internal web tools our partners work in, and the pipelines that connect us to dozens of upstream systems across Block. You'll also help shape where we're going next: LLM-powered agents that read and triage incoming legal requests, a secure portal for verified external requesters, and the evolution of our tools into a platform other Block teams build on.

You Will

• Partner closely with your team to design, develop, test, ship, and maintain features that automate how Block responds to legal, regulatory, and civil requests
• Write high-quality, well-tested code, and participate actively in design reviews and code reviews
• Design and implement systems that work within our microservice and event-driven architectures, handling highly sensitive customer data with the care and correctness that legal obligations demand
• Partner directly with Counsel, Compliance, and Operations to translate nuanced legal requirements into durable automated workflows
• Participate in operational ownership of engineering systems, including on-call, incident response, and postmortems
• Reduce toil and modernize services that grew quickly, leaving each one more reliable than you found it
• Demonstrate AI fluency by leveraging AI-powered tools throughout the development lifecycle to improve velocity and quality, while applying sound judgment in their use
• Hold your teammates — and yourself — to high engineering standards
• Learn from and support other engineers through code reviews and technical discussion

You Have

• 3+ years of software development or equivalent experience
• Experience building and maintaining production software systems, and delivering well-scoped projects or features end-to-end (design, build, test, ship, operate) with guidance from more experienced engineers
• Worked across the stack, on backend services and on the interfaces people use to operate them
• Drive to find flaws in a system with many moving parts and take whatever steps are necessary to fix them
• Curiosity about problems that arrive only partly specified, and a habit of asking the questions that make them concrete
• A track record of explaining technical tradeoffs in writing and in person, to engineers and non-engineers alike
• Demonstrated AI fluency, including experience using AI-powered developer tools and the ability to critically evaluate and responsibly apply their outputs
• Bachelor's Degree or Diploma in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience

Even better:

• Experience working with sensitive data (PII, PCI) or building to privacy, security, or regulatory requirements
• Experience building internal tools, operational workflows, or case management systems
• Experience integrating LLMs or agents into production workflows
• Experience modernizing a long-lived, business-critical service

Interest in legal, compliance, or investigations technology is a plus — deep domain expertise is not required; we'll teach you.

Technologies We Use and Teach

• Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq
• Java, Kotlin
• React, TypeScript
• AWS
• HTTP, JSON, gRPC, Protocol Buffers
• MySQL, Aurora, DynamoDB, Redis
• Kafka, event-driven architecture, microservices
• Datadog
• Buildkite, Gradle
• LLMs, AI agents and tooling (Goose, Claude, MCP

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.