Staff Android Software Engineer, Mobile Observability

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

As a Staff Android Software Engineer on the Mobile Observability team, you would join the foundational team responsible for driving mobile application observability across all of Square. You would tackle challenges across our entire suite of apps and in some cases the entire Android platform. You would work closely with the authors and maintainers of some of the most used open-source libraries in the Android space.

You will: 

• Identify, scope, and lead complex, strategic projects with wide impact across the company
• Gather functional and technical requirements and translate them into detailed architecture and designs
• Design highly available, and resilient systems which can operate no matter the network or device conditions
• Collaborate with multiple stakeholders across the company including product, design, legal, support, and other engineering teams
• Provide mentorship, expertise and design reviews for engineering teams across Square.
• Contribute to the direction of the team and prioritization of the projects on our roadmap

Qualifications

Must-Haves:

• 10 or more years of professional software development experience
• Deep understanding of the Android Platform, Java and Kotlin
• Ability to break down complex projects into components or milestones that can easily be picked up by other engineers
• Skill to investigate and identify the root cause of an issue in an unfamiliar codebase
• Motivation to influence our engineering organization to level-up the observability of the mobile apps we ship.
• Demonstrated collaboration with co-workers on cross-functional teams
• A strong sense of ownership
• Desire to understand and alleviate developer pain points
• Desire to facilitate adoption through high-quality documentation, tutorials, samples and pairing

Nice-to-Haves:

• Familiarity building and shipping mobile apps running on customized Android operating systems and hardware 
• Experience building engineering tools or profilers related to observability (eg: mobile clients for metrics, events, logs, and traces)
• Experience as a maintainer or contributor to Open Source projects
• Experience optimizing instrumentation of Android applications
• Experience working in a large engineering organization (hundreds of mobile engineers)

Technologies we use and teach:

• Kotlin, Java for mobile development; Gradle for build tooling.
• Compose, Workflow, Dagger, Anvil, Coroutines, RxJava, Retrofit, OkHttp.
• Observability related tooling such as Kafka, Snowflake, DataDog
• Performance related tooling such as LeakCanary, Perfetto, Macrobenchmark.
• Protocol Buffers and JSON for network transport
• SQLDelight and SQLite for data persistence

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 $180,000 - USD $247,500
Zone B: USD $171,000 - USD $235,200
Zone C: USD $162,000 - USD $222,800
Zone D: USD $153,000 - USD $210,400

To find a location’s zone designation, please re