Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Block•New York, NY

About The Position

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 As a member of the SRE team, you will proactively and reactively improve the reliability of Block's platform and critical infrastructure. You are metrics-driven, systems-oriented, and focused on building distributed platforms that enable safe, scalable product development. You will leverage and continuously improve AI-driven tooling and automation to enhance observability, accelerate incident detection and response, and reduce operational toil. This includes applying AI to incident analysis, alert tuning, and operational workflows. You will participate in primary platform oncall (12 hours per day, one week every few weeks, depending on team size), supporting Block's most critical (Tier 0) services. In this role, you will lead incident command, coordinate mitigation, and drive effective escalation during high-severity events. 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.

Requirements

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

Responsibilities

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)

Benefits

Healthcare coverage (Medical, Vision and Dental insurance)
Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Account
Retirement Plans including company match
Employee Stock Purchase Program
Wellness programs, including access to mental health, 1:1 financial planners, and a monthly wellness allowance
Paid parental and caregiving leave
Paid time off (including 12 paid holidays)
Paid sick leave (1 hour per 26 hours worked (max 80 hours per calendar year to the extent legally permissible) for non-exempt employees and covered by our Flexible Time Off policy for exempt employees)
Learning and Development resources
Paid Life insurance, AD&D, and disability benefits