Senior Engineering Manager, Data Operations Platform

Block is one company built from many blocks, all united by the same purpose of economic empowerment. The blocks that form our foundational teams — People, Finance, Counsel, Hardware, Information Security, Platform Infrastructure Engineering, and more — provide support and guidance at the corporate level. They work across business groups and around the globe, spanning time zones and disciplines to develop inclusive People policies, forecast finances, give legal counsel, safeguard systems, nurture new initiatives, and more. Every challenge creates possibilities, and we need different perspectives to see them all. Bring yours to Block.

The Role

As the Senior Engineering Manager for the Data Operations Platform team, you will be responsible for our lakehouse, ingestion pipelines, and the data fabric that powers downstream analytics and ML. In this role, you will combine domain expertise in data engineering with leadership experience to help architect, scale, and operate a robust, reliable data platform.

Reporting to the Head of AiDA Platform (ML & Data Platform), you will own and guide a team of engineers working on ingestion, streaming and batch pipelines, transformation layers, and integrations with data warehouses. You will partner closely with Platform, Analytics, ML, and product teams to prioritize, deliver, and evolve the data platform roadmap. You will also help define best practices, enforce data governance, and promote operational excellence across the data stack. Your team will ensure platform reliability, observability, security, and cost efficiency critical to Block.

You Will

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team working on data ingestion, transformation, and operations
• Oversee the design, implementation, deployment, and operation of the data platform, from raw lakes to refined tables
• Drive architectural direction for data pipelines, processing frameworks, and data storage (e.g. medallion architecture, delta lake, data lakehouse patterns)
• Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders (Analytics, ML, Product, Security, Ops) to align on data needs, SLAs, and platform strategy
• Promote software engineering best practices (CI/CD, testing, code reviews, monitoring) within the team
• Define and drive data schema evolution, versioning, lineage, and governance practices
• Prioritize and manage roadmap, tradeoffs, execution plans, and dependencies within and across teams
• Influence and evangelize the data platform across the broader engineering organization, establishing standards and promoting adoption
• Partner with leadership on hiring, resourcing, performance management, and team culture, fostering an inclusive and high-performing environment
• Stay current on industry trends in data engineering, compute engines, storage formats – proposing innovations where applicable

You Have

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, plus 4+ years in a management role
• Deep hands-on experience in data engineering, ingestion and transformation pipelines (batch and streaming)
• Prior experience with medallion architecture, data lakehouse, delta lake, data lake, data warehouse designs
• Experience designing and operating large-scale data systems at high throughput and low latency
• Strong architectural judgment and ability to make tradeoffs across performance, scalability, maintainability, and cost
• Experience with observability, monitoring, error handling, retries, schema evolution, data quality, and lineage
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, data storage (e.g. S3, ADLS), and integration with compute frameworks
• Excellent leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills — able to influence both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Experience building and growing engineering teams, managing performance, coaching engineers, and scaling processes

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 an equal opportunity employer evaluating all employees and job applicants without regard to identity or any legally protected class. We will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and “fair chance” ordinances.

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 workpl