Machine Learning Engineer (Modeling)

Company Description

It all started with an idea at Block in 2013. Initially built to take the pain out of peer-to-peer payments, Cash App has gone from a simple product with a single purpose to a dynamic ecosystem, developing unique financial products, including Afterpay/Clearpay, to provide a better way to send, spend, invest, borrow and save to our 47 million monthly active customers. We want to redefine the world’s relationship with money to make it more relatable, instantly available, and universally accessible.

Today, Cash App has thousands of employees working globally across office and remote locations, with a culture geared toward innovation, collaboration and impact. We’ve been a distributed team since day one, and many of our roles can be done remotely from the countries where Cash App operates. No matter the location, we tailor our experience to ensure our employees are creative, productive, and happy.

Check out our locations, benefits, and more at cash.app/careers.

Job Description

Machine Learning is an integral part of how we design products, operate, and pursue Cash App’s mission to serve the unbanked as well as disrupt traditional financial institutions. Our massive scale and deep trove of transaction data create an endless number of opportunities to use artificial intelligence to better understand our customers and offer new products and experiences that can improve their lives. We are a highly creative group that prefers to solve problems from first principles; we move quickly, make incremental changes, and deploy to production every day. Check out our Machine Learning / AI blog here!

This role is part of our Cash App's ML team and will be deeply embedded within one of our product teams - here are the workstreams we're currently hiring for:

Health

You'll build machine learning models that detect fraudulent activity in real time and help keep our customers safe and secure. You will experiment with state-of-the-art algorithms to drive down false positives, collaborate on new product features to drive fraud losses down, use any and every dataset at your disposal (including 3rd party data) to engineer new features for risk models, verify customer documents using OCR, and use biometric and device signals to detect malicious logins and account takeovers.

Customer Support Automation

We aim to create better-than-human Customer Support Experiences. Cash App holds people’s money, and building customers’ trust is absolutely essential to our brand. Providing fast and reliable help whenever the customer needs it is a major component of building that trust. You will build models that anticipate customer issues and deliver proactive in-app suggestions, use NLP to contextualize inquiries and respond instantly with relevant content, develop prioritization algorithms that improve efficiency, and apply the latest research to automate conversations with customers.

Underwriting and Credit

Our mission is to redefine credit and liquidity through simple, fair, and accessible credit solutions that build financial health and resilience. This team builds and integrates ML solutions for evaluating customer cash flow risk including risk of default on credit obligations, risk of fraud & abuse of loans and other situations where Cash app advances funds or provides liquidity to customers. We support multiple products across 4+ workstreams in Cash. Through your work you will empower the team to understand the financial performance of origination cohorts, optimize our automated decisioning pipeline using AI/ML, and help identify new opportunities for growth in our customer base. You will experiment with various modeling techniques on our comprehensive customer data and see your solution through to production by partnering cross-functionally with finance, product, and engineering teams.

Commerce Fraud Risk

Afterpay is the largest Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) product by market share in Australia and continues to experience rapid growth in the United States. Throughout this journey, we encounter risks and challenges from various aspects. The Commerce Fraud and Merchant Risk Team utilizes cutting-edge modeling technologies to effectively mitigate both fraud and merchant risks. Simultaneously, we collaborate with highly efficient product and development teams to continuously build and enhance a competitive risk management engine within the industry.

Technologies we use (and teach):

• Python (NumPy, Pandas, sklearn, xgboost, TensorFlow, keras, etc.)
• MySQL, Snowflake, GCP/AWS and Tableau
• Java

Qualifications

You have:

• 5+ years experience with applied Machine Learning or Deep Learning
• A graduate degree in Computer Science, AI, ML, Applied Math, Stats, Physics, or a related technical field
• Worked with Product, Design, and Engineering to prioritize, scope, design, and deploy ML models
• A track record of providing mentorship and technical leadership
• An appreciation for the connection between the software you build and the experience it delivers to customers

Additional Information

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. 

Full-time employee benefits include the following:

• 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 

These benefits are further detailed in Block's policies. This role is also eligible to participate in Block's equity plan subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies, and may be eligible for a sign-on bonus. Sales roles may be eligible to participate in a commission plan subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies. Pay and benefits are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefit plans.

We’re working to build a more inclusive economy where our customers have equal access to opportunity, and we strive to live by these same values in building our workplace. Block is a proud equal opportunity employer. We work hard to evaluate all employees and job applicants consistently, without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class. 

We believe in being fair, and are committed to an inclusive interview experience, including providing reasonable accommodations to disabled applicants throughout the recruitment process. We encourage applicants to share any needed accommodations with their recruiter, who will treat these requests as confidentially as possible. Want to learn more about what we’re doing to build a workplace that is fair and square? Check out our I+D page.

Additionally, we consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, assessing candidates in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

We’ve noticed a rise in recruiting impersonations across the industry, where individuals are sending fake job offer emails. Contact from any of our recruiters or employees will always come from an email address ending with @block.xyz, @squareup.com, @tidal.com, or @afterpay.com, @clearpay.co.uk.

Block, Inc. (NYSE: SQ) is a global technology company with a focus on financial services. Made up of Square, Cash App, Spiral, TIDAL, and TBD, we build tools to help more people access the economy. Square helps sellers run and grow their businesses with its integrated ecosystem of commerce solutions, business software, and banking services. With Cash App, anyone can easily send, spend, or invest their money in stocks or Bitcoin. Spiral (formerly Square Crypto) builds and funds free, open-source Bitcoin projects. Artists use TIDAL to help them succeed as entrepreneurs and connect more deeply with fans. TBD is building an open developer platform to make it easier to access Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies without having to go through an institution.

While there is no specific deadline to apply for this role, on average, U.S. open roles are posted for 70 days before being filled by a successful candidate.