Software Engineer, Justice Engineering

Block•Bay Area, CA, United States of America, CA

2d•$153,000 - $270,000•Remote

About The Position

The Justice Engineering team at Block builds the systems that 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. The services automate this work end to end, identifying the right customer, assembling and securely delivering records, freezing and releasing accounts, moving money, and notifying customers. As a full stack software engineer on Justice Engineering, you will design, build, and operate these services. The scope includes owning features end to end across backend services, internal web tools, and pipelines. Future work includes LLM-powered agents for triaging legal requests and a secure portal for external requesters.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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
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