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Staff Software Engineer, Payments Acquiring

Block· 10414 Engineering - Fintech Platform
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Hybrid (Pacific Time Zone)$263.6k - $395.4kfull-timePosted 1w ago

About the role

Staff Software Engineer on the Acquiring team responsible for the card payments acquiring stack across Square, Cash App, and Afterpay. Focuses on direct network connections, card network integration, and building durable payments capabilities at Block-scale.

Responsibilities

  • Bring deep card acceptance expertise to the team, reading network specifications, ISO 8583 messages, mandates, and interchange rules, and turning them into sound engineering decisions.
  • Own the technical direction of your projects from design through production rollout, and lead the engineers working on them.
  • Partner with technical leads, product and finance operations partners, and stakeholders across Square, Cash App, and Afterpay to shape solutions where card-network requirements intersect with Block's acquiring platform.
  • Stay deeply hands-on: write production code, build testing and certification tooling, analyze network messages, review designs and code, and debug issues down to the protocol and field level.
  • Make and defend the technical calls on routing, retries, and processing cost, backed by data on authorization rates and fees.
  • Establish shared frameworks, standards, tooling, and practices that make payments expertise durable so the team makes good payments decisions without routing every question through you.
  • Raise the technical capability of engineers through design guidance, code reviews, mentorship, documentation, and clear technical judgment. Help grow the next staff engineers on the team.
  • Build with AI agents across the engineering lifecycle, and help set the patterns for using them safely on systems that move money.
  • Share operational ownership of critical financial systems through on-call, incident response, and continuous improvements to reliability and correctness

Qualifications

  • Deep card payments experience at the message level (ISO 8583 or acquirer/processor formats) with network connections; acquiring or merchant-side experience preferred.
  • Experience with hard card transaction cases (partial/incremental authorizations, reversals, tips, currency conversion, interchange qualification).
  • Strong hands-on software engineering experience building and operating highly reliable financial/payments systems at scale, with automated testing and safe rollouts.
  • Track record of leading technically complex projects from design to delivery and setting technical direction.
  • Experience creating durable technical leverage (frameworks, standards, tooling, architecture).
  • Broad understanding of end-to-end card payment flows and familiarity with card data security, routing, authorization, capture, clearing/settlement, reconciliation, interchange, processing costs, chargebacks.
  • Solid understanding of card networks (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, US debit) and how acquirers/processors/sponsoring banks fit between sellers and networks.
  • Experience building with AI coding agents and judicious use of AI outputs in payments systems.
  • Willingness to participate in on-call rotation for critical financial systems.

Skills

Required:ISO 8583 / card network messagingCard networks knowledgeLeadership of complex projects

Benefits

  • Remote work, medical insurance, flexible time off, retirement savings plans, and modern family planning
Last updated Oct 14, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Block

Block builds technology to increase access to the global economy.

Made up of Square, Cash App, Afterpay, TIDAL, Bitkey, and Proto, Block, Inc. builds technology to increase access to the global economy.

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