Invent today. Shape tomorrow.
Thank you for considering Square!
It takes a great deal to interview, and find a career that aligns with your values.
We know you may have a lot of questions and want to do our best to answer them before you come onsite. Below you will find the building blocks that make up Square’s engineering culture.
Purpose
Our purpose is economic empowerment. It’s personal. It’s our community. It’s our culture. We’re looking out for our consumers, listening to their concerns, and building a suite of tools and services to start, run, and grow a business. We believe that everyone should have the ability to participate in the economy and we’ve created an ecosystem of products to serve this purpose. They shouldn’t have to think about it; it’s a complicated process, but we want to simplify it. We’re building a world class platform that is fast, cohesive, self-serve and elegant. And it’s for all sellers—take a look at a few of our sellers stories here.
Communities + Interest Groups
Inclusion and belonging are paramount to us at Square. We’re building an inclusive economy, and it’s important that we live by these same values when building our workplace. We have many employee-founded, employee-run resource groups that celebrate, raise awareness of, and advocate for those historically under-represented or marginalized in the tech industry. These groups aim to promote inclusivity through networking, professional development opportunities, lectures, workshops, guest speakers, social events, and office installations. Participation in Square Communities is open to all, and anyone can propose adding a new community!
In addition to our Communities, Interests Groups offer a great way to connect with other Squares who are passionate about the same things you care about – whether that is a specific technical domain (Android, Ruby, etc.), running, volunteering, business ownership, or something else.
At Square you will have numerous opportunities to connect with others. We encourage you to share your interests, skills, and background within the company through participation in our Communities and Interest Groups. Learn more here!
Career Growth
At Square we operate with a growth mindset, meaning we support engineers as they build skills, take on new challenges, and grow in their careers. Each engineering team is autonomous, and creates the work culture that works best for them (sprints, stand up, tools etc). We have developed clear principles, and standards that allow for you, in partnership with your lead, to widen your impact in a way that aligns with your professional goals. We encourage growth in your current role, leveling up and promotion, as well as movement into a new role (20% of all new software engineering roles get filled through internal transfer). We also do work to help ensure that unconscious bias doesn’t influence your growth. Read all about our approach here.
Square provides a large amount of resources to explore internal opportunities, along with programs available to help you grow in your current role. We host in person, virtual, and on-demand workshops, leadership and management training to help new leads as they progress in their careers, and every employee has access to a Skillshare account with over 30,000 classes. Example classes include delivering feedback, SQL for newbies, and Machine Learning bootcamp. We’ve also created a Project Marketplace where you can find or post projects you may be interested in working on.
Decentralized Workforce
We are an innovative company and constantly evolving; building a decentralized workforce is one of the many ways we are evolving. We have offices across the US, Canada, Japan, the UK, Ireland, and Australia. Depending on the team and expectations of the role, we also hire in remote locations to offer engineers flexibility. In taking this step toward a decentralized workforce, and keeping the team unified, we’ve kept our operating principles top of mind, and will continue to as we evolve.
We see this in action on multiple engineering teams that are distributed across San Francisco, Seattle, Oregon, and to folks regularly working from home.
Impact, Innovation, and Empowerment
Impact
The impact you can make at Square is significant. Our teams are kept small, and work like startups to maintain an inventive spirit, and empower our employees to create and build.
Two of our fastest moving products have come out of hack week ideas (Cash and Capital), both of which evolved into revenue-generating products. Our teams are cross-collaborative among different functions including engineering, design, data science, machine learning, hardware, and product management.
Innovation
We’ve built (and are still building) tools and products that are relevant to what’s happening around us. Our ecosystem of tools for sellers helps anyone start, run, and grow a business. For individuals—Cash App—is changing how people manage their money by providing easy ways to send, spend, and store funds. This applies to not only our buyers/consumers, but to the developer community as well. Check our our open source contributions here!
Empowerment
Engineers at Square are very empowered. The voice of an engineer is truly heard at Square. Our planning processes are bottom-up which enables the engineers to create influence and impact.
Engineering Events
We encourage and support our engineers to give back to the engineering community! Over the past year, Square Engineers have given over 30 tech talks at a variety of different engineering conferences, ranging from DroidCon to RailsConf to Tech Ladies. Over the same time, Square Engineers have also published over 50 blog posts, many of which can be found here.
As an engineer at Square, you can learn and develop skills on how to present, but more importantly give you the opportunity to highlight the work that helps empower engineering outside of our walls.
We’re excited that you’re considering Square for your next career move, and hope that you’ve found this guide to be informative and helpful.