Staff Engineer, Frontend/Fullstack

Company Description

Since we opened our doors in 2009, the world of commerce has evolved immensely, and so has Square. After enabling anyone to take payments and never miss a sale, we saw sellers stymied by disparate, outmoded products and tools that wouldn’t work together.

So we expanded into software and started building integrated, omnichannel solutions – to help sellers sell online, manage inventory, offer buy now, pay later functionality through Afterpay, book appointments, engage loyal buyers, and hire and pay staff. Across it all, we’ve embedded financial services tools at the point of sale, so merchants can access a business loan and manage their cash flow in one place. Afterpay furthers our goal to provide omnichannel tools that unlock meaningful value and growth, enabling sellers to capture the next generation shopper, increase order sizes, and compete at a larger scale.

Today, we are a partner to sellers of all sizes – large, enterprise-scale businesses with complex operations, sellers just starting, as well as merchants who began selling with Square and have grown larger over time. As our sellers grow, so do our solutions. There is a massive opportunity in front of us. We’re building a significant, meaningful, and lasting business, and we are helping sellers worldwide do the same.

Job Description

The Public Web team is a full-stack engineering team responsible for the architecture, infrastructure and site reliability of Square’s marketing website - www.squareup.com. Square’s public website is one of the key surface areas to drive consideration and conversion with prospective Sellers. The website supports both self-onboarded (signup/download the app) and sales-onboarded (lead form submission/MQL) paths, making it a critical front door for window shoppers and purchasing moments. 

We have an exciting time ahead of us with key initiatives such as a full site redesign to give it soul and simplify discovery for our customers. We are working with product and design teams to redefine information architecture and build an audience focused journey. We are also in a platform re-architecture journey where we are moving to a microservices architecture with goals to improve resiliency, page performance, page build time and developer experience. 

Square recently consolidated all members of our web engineering discipline into a centralized organization, specifically to elevate our velocity and quality. You will be part of this transformational time, to help establish the blueprint for modern and high velocity front-end development at scale, and work with other experts in the web engineering org.

As a Staff Engineer on the Public Web team, you will: 

• Build and support Square’s Public Web - a surface used by millions of Square sellers to discover the ecosystem of Square’s offerings - ensuring we are proud to sign our names to the experiences we enable there

• Identify and explore ways to improve application architecture, testing, and build pipeline

• Continually seek to optimize and improve the seller experience 

• Iterate rapidly on features, tooling, and processes

• Work with other senior front-end engineers to establish and evangelize best practices and patterns 

• Write code to serve a server side rendered CMS based website

• Write code to build the design system that allows Design Technologists and content authors to build and deploy web pages in a no-code and low-code manner

• Support an ongoing effort to fully deprecate a legacy Ruby on Rails stack

• Prioritize and advocate for tooling and build investments to add leverage for every front-end engineer 

• Actively participate in reviewing technical documents and roadmaps to advocate for the right architectural tradeoffs

• Advocate for process improvements within the team/organization in a critical, but thoughtful and empathetic way

• Mentor engineers across the organization, evolving and instilling a culture of high quality and high velocity work

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience with JavaScript/TypeScript and modern web frameworks (especially Svelte and/or React)

• Extensive experience in web markup languages (HTML5 and CSS3), backend technologies such (NodeJS, ExpressJS and Ruby), and front-end build tools (Webpack, ESbuild, and Vite)

• Proven record of consistently delivering large features (spanning ~1+ year with multiple milestones) and large teams from start to finish with strong collaboration, communication, and ownership

• Expertise in building web apps and large-scale applications

• Expertise with modern front-end and server-side rendering technologies and frameworks (Svelte and React)

• Highly effective communicator to all disciplines and comfortable presenting and demoing work to large audiences

• Hands-on experience setting up and maintaining large-scale web applications with a substantial contributor base (dozens of active weekly contributors)

• Deeply comfortable with and able to apply software development design principles (SOLID, DRY) in daily work

• Enjoy working in a collaborative environment and partner with other cross-disciplinary teams (designers, design technologists, product managers, data scientists) to achieve optimal results

• Proficiency with CI pipelines and cloud infrastructure (mainly AWS and Cloudflare)

• Excellence in test coverage (unit, and end-to-end)

• Experience being on-call, and are comfortable working under pressure

Additional Information

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.

Zone A: USD $198,000 - USD $297,000
Zone B: USD $188,100 - USD $282,100
Zone C: USD $178,200 - USD $267,400
Zone D: USD $168,300 - USD $252,500

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.

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.