Juan Hernandez

Juan Hernandez is the Head of Credit & Underwriting at Block, where he leads credit strategy, automation, and portfolio risk across the company's consumer lending products, including Cash App and Afterpay. His team builds real-time, machine learning-driven systems designed to expand access to fair and transparent credit for millions of customers traditionally underserved by the financial system.

Juan brings over a decade of experience at the intersection of machine learning, AI research, and credit risk. He joined Square in 2015 as a Technical Lead in Data Science, where he built the automated decisioning algorithms (customer eligibility, offer sizing, and price optimization) that power Square Capital's multi-billion-dollar commercial lending business. He went on to extend ML-driven credit risk solutions across the Square ecosystem before moving to the company's ML Platform team, where he conducted applied AI research and built frameworks used by data scientists company-wide, including pioneering work on ML prediction explanations using generative adversarial networks.

In 2019, Juan transitioned to Cash App as a Staff Machine Learning Engineer before rising to Senior Director of Machine Learning, leading a horizontal ML team responsible for underwriting and credit risk management across Cash App and Afterpay.

Prior to Block, Juan was a Data Scientist at FICO, where he applied machine learning to consumer and commercial finance problems and shipped FICO's first cloud-hosted ML model. He was also a Research Fellow at UC Berkeley, where he received a grant from the Digital Humanities group to explore recurrent neural networks for music composition, work he later presented as a guest lecturer at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS).Juan holds a degree from Northwestern University and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.