Tech Lead, Business Platform Engineering (Bizplat)

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

6d•$263,600 - $395,400•Remote

About The Position

Block's Business Platform (Bizplat) organization powers operational automation across the company, focused on Risk & Compliance, Customer Support, GTM and Sales, Finance, and Hardware Supply Chain. Over the past year, our teams have delivered measurable business outcomes across every major operational domain. Now, as we scale from isolated automation initiatives to a company-wide automation platform and operating model, we face a critical architectural challenge: too many services and too much fragmentation. We are looking for a Tech Lead who will serve as the overall systems architect for Bizplat — someone who can see across our sprawling service landscape, identify redundancy and fragmentation, and drive consolidation onto well-architected central systems. You will be the technical decision-maker responsible for turning down the overwhelming number of services we've accumulated and replacing them with unified, scalable, and governable platform capabilities. This is a role for a strong technical leader who pairs deep systems design expertise with the judgment to make hard tradeoffs across automation domains.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in a technical leadership or architect role owning systems at scale
Deep experience consolidating and simplifying complex service architectures — you've successfully reduced service sprawl, migrated workloads across systems, and decommissioned legacy services in production environments
Strong systems design and architecture skills, with demonstrable experience building platforms used by multiple teams and business domains
Experience building or operating automation, workflow orchestration, or case management systems (e.g., Temporal, Airflow, custom workflow engines, or similar)
Track record of driving technical strategy across organizational boundaries — you've aligned multiple teams to a shared platform vision and executed on multi-quarter roadmaps
Fluency in designing for scalability, reliability, and governance — you understand the operational realities of running systems that process high-volume decisions in regulated environments
Experience with one or more of: AI/ML pipeline integration, event-driven architectures, contact center platforms, or business process automation
Strong software engineering fundamentals with the ability to write production-quality code, conduct meaningful design reviews, and make sound build-vs-buy decisions
Excellent communication and collaboration skills — you can explain complex architectural decisions to both engineering teams and non-technical business stakeholders
Comfort navigating ambiguity across multiple domains, making pragmatic decisions with incomplete information, and adjusting course as requirements evolve

Nice To Haves

Experience working with Forward Deployed Engineering or embedded platform team models where platform and domain concerns intersect
Background in financial services, risk/compliance, or payment systems where regulatory requirements shape architecture decisions
Familiarity with AI-powered decision systems, LLM-based automation, or agentic workflows in production
Experience with specific technologies in our stack: Kubernetes, Kafka, Temporal, GraphQL, Go, Java, or Ruby
Track record of reducing operational costs through platform consolidation (e.g., reducing manual hours, converging vendor tooling, eliminating duplicate data pipelines)

Responsibilities

Own the architectural vision for Bizplat's platform systems, defining the target state for a consolidated, well-architected service landscape that supports automation across Risk & Compliance, Customer Support, GTM/Sales, Finance, and Hardware Supply Chain
Drive service consolidation by identifying redundant, overlapping, or underutilized services and leading the technical strategy to turn them down, migrate workloads, and converge onto shared systems
Design and build core platform capabilities — including case management, workflow orchestration, AI/ML pipelines, event streaming, and integration frameworks — that are reusable across domains and teams
Lead technical planning and execution for high-priority cross-cutting initiatives such as contact center stack convergence, and automation platform maturity
Set and enforce engineering standards for system design, API contracts, observability, data governance, and operational reliability across Bizplat's engineering teams
Partner with Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) teams to ensure domain-specific solutions feed back into the platform as reusable capabilities rather than becoming one-off services
Make hard architectural tradeoffs between speed of delivery, technical debt reduction, reliability, and long-term platform direction — and communicate those tradeoffs clearly to leadership
Mentor and elevate engineers across the organization through design reviews, technical guidance, and knowledge sharing that raises the overall quality bar
Collaborate with stakeholders across Risk Ops, Customer Ops, Sales Ops, Finance, and Hardware to translate operational needs into scalable technical solutions
Use AI as a force multiplier in your engineering workflow and in the systems you design leveraging LLMs, agentic architectures, and automation to accelerate delivery