Security Engineer - Network Edge Security

Block is one company built from many blocks, all united by the same purpose: economic empowerment. We build technology that increases access and independence for sellers, individuals, and artists around the world. Working at Block means working on and across our brands—Square, Cash App, Afterpay, TIDAL, Spiral, and Proto— in roles that connect, enable, and push all of them forward faster.

We’re remote-first by design and operate with intelligence at the center of everything we do. At Block, you'll be challenged by some of the brightest, most creative minds in the industry and have the tools and autonomy to do the most meaningful work of your career

The Role

The Network Edge Security team builds the tools that provide important insights to our API Security posture and trustworthiness of traffic flowing into our systems. Our capabilities use machine learning, streaming analytics, and significant data analysis to provide insights into understanding our network edge risk exposure and the true sources of our request flows. The team’s primary focus is up-leveling our API security posture for downstream products and services. However, there is also a need at times to respond quickly to emerging threats to take action at the edge to provide immediate relief. The team is small, requiring nimbleness and flexibility to stay ahead of threat actors. You should have a strong passion for the problem space – needing to understand a significant range of knowledge around Content Distribution Networks (CDN), analytical tools, network protocols and behavior, as well as authentication and authorization systems. You will work closely with many teams across the organization both engineering and operational to gain the insights required to understand the problem space as well as monitor the effectiveness of our solutions.

You Will

• Respond and mitigate emerging threats and attacks at our network edge by leveraging WAF rules, bot vendors, and other CDN-native technologies 
• Help build out infrastructure that gives us better inventory of our network edge security posture
• Build out and maintain a near-real time streaming analytics data pipeline and application
• Contribute to the evolution of our labeling and ML model development.
• Help manage and maintain our systems across build, deploy, and production monitoring,
• Be flexible with respect to computer languages as we use Java, Kotlin, Python, TypeScript, PySpark and others as needed or appropriate
• Evaluate and build integrations with vendor systems that may be used in addition to in-house solutions
• Develop and implement AI-driven capabilities to automatically classify and mitigate abusive traffic patterns
• Significant experience with bot/fraud identification and mitigation systems is a strong plus

You Have

• 5+ years of software or security engineering experience developing scalable production software incorporating testing, evaluation, and monitoring
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience
• Proficient in Java, Kotlin, Typescript, and Python
• Proficient in data analysis using SQL and Spark
• Experience implementing and maintaining applications in both a CDN (Cloudflare and Fastly) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystems
• Familiarity with Snowflake, Databricks, and Datadog are a strong plus

Technologies We Use and Teach

• Java/Kotlin, Javascript/Typescript, Python 
• CDN (Cloudflare and Fastly)
• Snowflake, MySQL, DynamoDB, Databricks
• AWS
• Kafka
• Datadog, Terraform

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 workplace that is fair and square? Check out our I+D page.

While there is no specific deadline to apply for this role, U.S. roles are typically open for an average of 55 days before being filled by a successful candidate. Please refer to the date listed at the top of this job page for when this role was first posted.