Staff Software Engineer, Payments Acquiring

Block, Bay Area, CA +1

Block has this job in 1 other place

Seattle, WA, United States of America

The role

At Block, we strive to build the best financial products in the world. The Financial Platform Acquiring team owns the acquiring side of card payments for Square, Cash App, and Afterpay. When someone pays with a card at a Square seller, through Afterpay, or uses a card to move money in or out of Cash App, our systems make sure that payment happens correctly, every time.

We take in and tokenize card data from chip, tap, digital wallets, and online checkout, route each payment, and get it authorized over our direct network connections and acquiring partners. Then we capture, clear, and settle it, in the US and internationally. Across Square and Cash App, Block processed nearly $260 billion in payment volume in 2025, and we run our own direct connections to card networks in several countries alongside our acquiring partners.

When a customer taps their card at a register, our systems route the authorization and bring back the issuer's answer in under a second, around the clock, in partnership with card networks and bank partners.

What you need

Deep card payments experience at the message level: you have built or run the integrations that talk to networks, acquirers, or processors (ISO 8583 or an acquirer's host format), not only called a payment provider's API. Acquiring or merchant-side experience is ideal, and a direct network connection is a strong plus. ISO 20022 is a plus.
Experience with the hard cases in real card transactions, such as partial and incremental authorizations, reversals, tips, currency conversion, and interchange qualification.
Strong hands-on software engineering experience building and operating highly reliable financial or payments systems at scale, with solid habits in design review, automated testing, and safe, observable rollouts.
A track record of leading technically complex projects from design through delivery and setting technical direction for the engineers working on them.
Experience creating durable technical leverage — frameworks, standards, tooling, architecture, or practices that other engineers and teams adopt.
Broad understanding of how a card payment moves end to end, with depth in areas such as card data security and tokenization, routing, authorization, capture, clearing and settlement, reconciliation, interchange and processing costs, or chargebacks.
Solid understanding of card network rules (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and US debit networks), and of how acquirers, processors, payment facilitators, and sponsor banks fit between sellers and the networks.
Daily experience building with AI coding agents, and good judgment about when their output is right.
Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation for critical financial systems.

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.

Block takes a market-based approach to pay, and pay may vary depending on your location. U.S. locations are categorized into one of four zones based on a cost of labor index for that geographic area. The successful candidate’s starting pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. These ranges may be modified in the future.

To find a location’s zone designation, please refer to this resource. If a location of interest is not listed, please speak with a recruiter for additional information.

Zone A

$263,600—$395,400 USD

Zone B

$263,600—$395,400 USD

Zone C

$263,600—$395,400 USD

Zone D

$263,600—$395,400 USD

Application Guidelines

Candidates may submit up to 9 active applications within a 60-day period. Reapplications to the same role are accepted 90 days after a previous application has been reviewed.

Staff Software Engineer, Payments Acquiring

The role

Staff Software Engineer, Payments Acquiring

The role

What you will do

What you need

Zone A

Zone B

Zone C

Zone D

Use of AI in Our Hiring Process

About Block

Block

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