Since we first opened our doors in 2009, the world of commerce has evolved immensely – and so has Square. After enabling anyone to take a payment 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, run a busy kitchen, book appointments, engage loyal buyers, and hire and pay staff. And 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 all in one place.

Today, we’re a partner to sellers of all sizes – large, enterprise-scale businesses with complex commerce operations, sellers just starting out, as well as merchants who began selling with Square and have grown larger over time. As our sellers scale, so do our solutions. We all grow together.

There is a massive opportunity in front of us. We’re building a business that is big, meaningful, and lasting. And we are helping sellers around the world do the same.  

Content is king — Square merchants succeed when their content conveys the story and value of their products effectively. Yet the average merchant is not an expert in product photography, copywriting, SEO, or design. Furthermore, the average merchant has many existing sources of content available to them, but digitizing them to put them on an online store requires tedious manual effort. These factors hinder merchants from putting their best foot forward and starting selling online quickly.

The Square Ecommerce ML team focuses on removing these frictions by using ML to help merchants import, manage, and improve their content. We have successful applications for some of these problems, but we're still discovering the best ways to accomplish this and the best applications for ML in this context. We're looking for a creative ML Engineer that is interested in building merchant-facing products, that is excited about finding novel ways of applying existing ML techniques to create exciting new products, and that is comfortable finding the right balance of algorithmic performance and simplicity to reduce time-to-market.

You will:

• Work on deep learning-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV) applications to improve document understanding, merchant site content, and merchant photography.
• Help procure, curate, and QA annotated data for new document parsing applications as well as for computer vision applications.
• Identify and use existing SOTA models, or build custom models based on SOTA approaches in NLP and CV, by reviewing the literature to identify best solutions to merchant problems.
• Work with product, design, and web/mobile engineering stakeholders to productionalize models into merchant-facing features by deploying them to services or mobile applications.
• In the long term, support or independently drive discovery of novel applications of ML to text and image content import, classification, and transformation.

You Have: 

• A Bachelor's degree with 2-3 years of experience in software development or a MSc/PhD with 0-2 years of experience.
• Already graduated or will be able to start working full-time in the next month.
• A strong modeling background, and experience building pipelines, modeling, and experimenting in frameworks like Keras or Pytorch.
• Experience training deep learning models for NLP applications or CV applications. If recently graduated, candidate should have thesis work or publications in these fields or closely related ones.
• Experience building services to serve ML applications in real-time, using technologies like Flask and MySQL.
• Working knowledge with cloud services like AWS, GCS, and their command line utilities.
• Experience working on ML projects end to end while collaborating with a variety of stakeholders.

Preferred: 

• Experience modifying SOTA deep learning architectures and experimenting with them to improve model performance.
• Demonstrated technical leadership and initiative in previous projects.
• Experience driving ML projects from beginning to end independently.
• The ability to convert open-ended product requirements into concrete ML solutions with a well-defined scope.

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. Square 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.

Perks

We want you to be well and thrive. Our global benefits package includes:

• Healthcare coverage
• Retirement Plans
• Employee Stock Purchase Program
• Wellness perks
• Paid parental leave
• Paid time off
• Learning and Development resources

Block, Inc. (NYSE: SQ) is a global technology company with a focus on financial services. Made up of Square, Cash App, Spiral, TIDAL, and TBD54566975, 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. TBD54566975 is building an open developer platform to make it easier to access Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies without having to go through an institution.