Manik Surtani is Head of Open Source at Block (formerly Square), responsible for the Open Source Programs Office and Block’s open-source strategy and culture. He is a co-creator of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF; aaif.io) and serves on the AAIF board.

Since joining Block in 2013, Manik has held senior engineering leadership and staff IC roles across Square and Cash App, including VP of Engineering for Cloud And Developer Experience. Prior to Block, he was a Principal Engineer at Red Hat, where he founded and led the Infinispan project and led data platforms such as JBoss Data Grid.

Manik’s background includes distributed and fault-tolerant systems, data grids, networking and load balancing, and JVM performance. Today he focuses on how open source accelerates agentic AI while balancing transparency, safety, and velocity - work that includes goose (block.github.io/goose), Block’s open source AI agent framework.