Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Modeling), , Financial Crimes (CashApp)

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

The Financial Crimes Technology team at Cash App detects and reports illegal and suspicious activity on Cash App. We work globally with partners in Product, Counsel and Engineering to ensure that we are providing a safe user experience for our customers while minimizing or eliminating bad activity on our platform.

We are leveraging Generative AI (specifically Large Language Models) and Machine Learning as an integral part of our toolkit to fulfill our mission. As Cash App scales, we monitor hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions across traditional payment and blockchain networks. Our machine learning systems monitor and surface suspicious activity (money laundering, illegal activity and terms of service violations) for agent review. Our systems also proactively block payments in real time where appropriate. Now, we are also leveraging generative AI technologies to improve agent workflow and case review tools; by adding features that accelerate agent productivity and enable them to make faster, more informed and accurate decisions.

This is a new and significant opportunity to rethink and optimize Financial Crimes Operations at CashApp scale. This is an IC role, but the Staff level has significant leadership responsibilities that include owning, and driving strategic roadmaps & priorities to completion by collaborating with relevant cross functional stakeholders.

 You will:

• Experiment and deploy AI copilot and self-driving solutions at scale to improve agent productivity and/or eliminate manual decision loops altogether

• Own the end to end pipeline including API calls to disparate data sources, advanced prompt tuning and/or model fine tuning, metrics and evaluation, and integrating Gen AI output into production case generation systems

• Leverage LLMs to accelerate label generation to alleviate cold start problems for traditional ML classification problems 

• Build classification models to detect illegal use of the app across the peer-to-peer, banking, card, equities and bitcoin products

• Leverage diverse data sets that include payment transactions, connected users and asset graphs, unstructured text data and user profile information to build ML and Generative AI models.  

• Work with the embedded Machine Learning Engineers on the team and ML platform services to deploy models to the production environment and monitor ongoing performance

• Use Python ML stack, LLMs, Pytorch, Snowflake, Airflow based tools, data platform and cloud services (both GCP & AWS) to get the job done

Qualifications

You Have: 

• 5+ years of Machine Learning modeling experience. Full stack ML experience is strongly preferred

• A Masters or advanced degree in computer science, data science, operations research, applied math, stats, physics, or a related technical field

• Experience with Large language models, and a background in traditional NLP techniques is a strong plus for this role

• End to end experience of building and deploying ML/AI to production systems (batch and real time) that are performant at scale

• Experience of independently owning, influencing and driving programs with multiple cross functional stakeholders that have significant business impact

• Have a curious, growth-oriented mindset and the ability to think in first principles to identify creative solutions that demonstrate value

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.

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.