Staff Software Engineer, Payments Acquiring

Block

Confirmed live yesterday High trust

Remote

Quick summary

Work type: Remote
Location: San Francisco, CASeattle, WA
Salary: $263,600–$395,400 / yr
Posted: 1 day ago
Freshness: Confirmed live yesterday
Nearby: 99+ roles within 25 mi

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $216k

This role $330k

$113k $426k

below market most similar roles pay here above market

This role pays more than 99% of similar roles. Most pay $194,709–$238,250 — the blue band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $330k versus about $216k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Block

Block, Inc. (formerly Square) is a financial technology company operating the Square merchant payments ecosystem, Cash App peer-to-peer payments, TIDAL music streaming, and Bitcoin-focused financial services. Industry: Financial Technology & Payments

Block currently has 50 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $207,900–$311,900 across 50 roles with salary data.

Most-posted roles

View all roles at Block

At a glance

TL;DR · Staff Software Engineer, Payments Acquiring

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JOB TITLE: Careers - Staff Software Engineer, Payments Acquiring As a Staff Software Engineer on the Financial Platform Acquiring team, you will lead complex technical projects to manage card payments for Square, Cash App, and Afterpay. You will own the technical direction of projects from design through production, building systems and tooling to expand direct network connections and deliver network mandates. Your daily work involves writing production code, debugging at the message level, and analyzing network messages to ensure reliable authorization, capture, clearing, and settlement. You must possess deep expertise in card payment stacks, specifically ISO 8583 messages, interchange rules, and tokenization. You will also utilize AI agents across the engineering lifecycle to build durable capabilities. This role solves critical problems in routing, retries, and processing costs for global card transactions.

What does a Software Engineer earn in California?

Median $214500 from 1206 postings across 79 companies.

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Skills

ISO 8583 ISO 20022 Card Payments Tokenization API AI Agents Automated Testing Incident Response On-call Data Security Clearing and Settlement Reconciliation Interchange Rules

What you'll do

Own the technical direction of complex card payment projects from initial design through production rollout.
Write production code and build testing and certification tooling for card acceptance systems.
Analyze network messages and debug issues down to the protocol and field level.
Make technical decisions on routing, retries, and processing costs based on authorization rates and fees.
Establish shared frameworks, standards, and tooling to make payments expertise durable for the engineering team.
Mentor other engineers through design guidance, code reviews, and technical judgment.
Share operational ownership of critical financial systems through on-call rotations and incident response.
Build and set patterns for using AI agents safely across the engineering lifecycle.

What we're looking for

Bring deep card acceptance expertise, including reading network specifications, ISO 8583 messages, mandates, and interchange rules.
Experience building or running integrations that talk to networks, acquirers, or processors at the message level.
Strong hands-on software engineering experience building and operating highly reliable financial or payments systems at scale.
Track record of leading technically complex projects from design through delivery and setting technical direction for engineers.
Broad understanding of card payment flows, including data security, tokenization, routing, authorization, capture, clearing, and settlement.
Solid understanding of card network rules and the roles of acquirers, processors, payment facilitators, and sponsor banks.
Daily experience building with AI coding agents and good judgment regarding their output.
Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation for critical financial systems.

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