About Handshake

Handshake was founded on a simple belief that everyone deserves a path to a great career, regardless of where they went to school or who they know. Today, we power 25 million job seekers, 1 million+ employers, and 1,600 educational institutions.

In 2025, we started Handshake AI and built the fastest-growing AI data business in history. We work directly with frontier AI lab researchers to create evaluations, publish benchmarks, and push the boundary of data. We’ve grown from $0 to ~$1B run rate and pay ~$60M to over 30K individuals every month.

Why join Handshake now:

Shape how every career evolves in the AI economy, at global scale, with impact your friends, family and peers can see and feel
Partner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world’s top educational institutions
Work together with engineers, scientists, operators, and more from Palantir, Meta, Scale AI, and former YC founders
Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue

About Handshake AI

Human data is the core infrastructure to AI advancement. Frontier AI labs currently improve model capabilities with various data-intensive post-training techniques. We believe that data spend for AI training will increase by 3-5x in the next few years and continue for much longer as models take on new domains. Handshake AI supports all of the frontier AI labs, working on their most complex data at the largest scale.

The Role

We’re looking for a Software Engineer to make development at Handshake faster, more reliable, and easier to understand.

Coding agents are a core part of how our engineers work. Both need reliable tools, useful instructions, and clear feedback to produce code we can trust. You’ll build and improve tools that run builds and tests, review changes, and explain failures. Your work will help engineers and agents spend less time waiting or debugging and more time building.

You’ll care as much about how a tool feels to use as whether it works. Is it fast? Are the next steps clear? Does an error message help someone solve the problem? You’ll use developer surveys, conversations with engineers, and system data to guide improvements.

You don’t need a background in developer tools or AI. We’re looking for strong coding skills, curiosity, and a desire to make complex systems easier to use.

What You’ll Do

Build and maintain tools for builds, tests, code review, and merging changes. Make them useful for both engineers and coding agents.
Find and fix slow builds, unreliable tests, and confusing errors. Address the cause rather than asking users to work around the problem.
Make tests faster and more reliable. Split work across machines, reuse previous results when safe, and keep tests from interfering with one another.
Make failures easier to understand. Help users see what went wrong and what they can do next.
Improve the tools, instructions, and environments that coding agents use to write, test, and debug code.
Help build automated code reviews and checks. Reduce repetitive work while keeping clear standards for quality and safety.
Use developer surveys and direct feedback to find problems worth solving. Work with teammates to release improvements safely, then check whether they made a difference.
Share what you learn through documentation, code reviews, and working sessions with other engineers.

You Have

About 3–5 years of professional software engineering experience, or comparable hands-on experience.
Strong JavaScript or TypeScript skills and experience in the JavaScript ecosystem. Your background may be server-side, such as Node.js or Bun, or browser-based.
Hands-on experience with JavaScript unit testing and end to end tests with tools like Jest, Vitest and Playwright.
Experience shipping and maintaining production software, including writing automated tests.
A careful approach to debugging. You test your assumptions and follow the evidence to find the cause.
Curiosity about unfamiliar code and the patience to learn how a system works.
A high bar for user experience. You notice small frustrations, listen to users, and care about the details that make tools easy to use.
The ability to finish clearly defined projects on your own. You also know when to ask for help or work through a problem with a teammate.
Clear communication and a willingness to give feedback, learn from others, and share what you know.

Extra Credit

You don’t need to know every tool we use. Any of the following would be helpful:

Work on build systems or continuous integration (CI), using tools such as Buildkite, GitHub Actions, Docker, or Kubernetes.
Experience building or extending test frameworks and shared libraries that make authoring tests more efficient and reliable.
Experience making tests faster or fixing tests that fail without a code change.
Hands-on use of coding agents, including giving them useful instructions and checking their results.
Work on automated code review or testing, with or without AI.
Experience making software builds and releases reliable and secure.
Use of logs, metrics, or traces to investigate problems.

Perks

Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supported—and thrive at work and in life.

The below benefits are for full-time US employees.

🎯 Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company

💰 Financial Wellness: 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coaching

🍼 Family Support: Paid parental leave, fertility benefits, parental coaching

💝 Wellbeing: Medical, dental, and vision, mental health support, $500 wellness stipend

📚 Growth: $2,000 learning stipend, ongoing development

💻 Remote & Office: Internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF office

🏝 Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days

🤝 Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses

Explore our mission, values, and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.

About the company

Handshake connects job seekers, employers, and university career centers through recruiting software, and supplies AI labs with experts who train and test language models. Its career platform combines job matching, recruiting events, and profiles that show completed AI projects and paid training experience. Handshake AI recruits and matches fellows to projects where they review model answers, create training data, and apply knowledge from their own fields. Employers pay for recruiting subscriptions and promotions, while its enterprise AI team builds agents and trains models inside customers' systems. Handshake was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in San Francisco.

Company Size

501-1,000

Company Stage

Series F

Total Funding

$434M

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2014

Get referred to Handshake

See people who can refer or advise you

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

AI work has substantial scale: Handshake reports over $500 million paid to fellows.
Engineering careers span several AI businesses: Handshake lists coding-agent, post-training, and enterprise AI roles.
Recruiting adds recurring sales: Handshake sells Pro employer subscriptions for $450 per month.

What critics are saying

Expect demanding hours: Handshake's Olympic pace value explicitly calls for urgency, hours, and energy.
Fellow work lacks continuity: Handshake says AI lab projects pause or close with little notice.
Recruiting needs paid upgrades: Handshake includes unlimited job posting in its free Basic plan.

What makes Handshake unique

Handshake has institutional distribution: its marketplace connects over 1,600 educational institutions with employers and job seekers.
Handshake links paid AI work to hiring signals: AI Fellow badges require at least five hours of completed work.
Handshake builds research internally: it reports 200-plus researchers and engineers publishing at major AI conferences.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Benefits

💰Equity and ownership in a fast-growing company.
🍼16 Weeks of paid parental leave
💝Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision
💻Handshake offers $500/£360 home office stipend
📚Generous learning & development opportunities and an annual $2,000/£1,500/2k€ stipend
🏦401k Match: Handshake offers a dollar-for-dollar match on 1% of deferred salary, up to a maximum of $1,200 per year.
🏝PTO

Company News

Justlearn

Sep 28th, 2026

Handshake expands AI push with StudentBench GRE tutor and three senior hires.

Handshake expands AI push with StudentBench GRE tutor and three senior hires. Handshake has launched StudentBench, an AI-powered GRE preparation tutor. The expansion signals growing adoption of AI tutoring tools in test preparation and career development platforms. By Just Learn Editorial / September 28, 2026 Handshake has launched StudentBench, an AI-powered GRE preparation tutor. The expansion signals growing adoption of AI tutoring tools in test preparation and career development platforms.

Provoke Media

Sep 25th, 2026

Stephen Rocco Rodi joins AI career network Handshake as CCO.

Stephen Rocco Rodi joins AI career network Handshake as CCO. Most recently Rodi led product and AI communications at and earlier spent seven and a half years at Meta. Paul Holmes 25 Sep 2026 // 10:15AM GMT SAN FRANCISCO - Handshake, the career network for the AI economy, has named Chime and Meta veteran Stephen Rocco Rodi as chief communications officer. He reports to CEO Garrett Lord and leads communications across the company. Most recently he led product and AI communications at Chime through its first year as a public company. Before that he spent seven and a half years at Meta, where he led global communications for several of the company's product groups, including its payments and fintech businesses. According to Rodi, "Handshake is built on the idea that intelligence comes from people. Millions of people start their careers here, and the same network is now teaching AI to do real work for the labs building the models, and the companies putting them to use. My job is to make sure that story gets told clearly, and honestly, at a moment when a lot of people are anxious about what AI means for their work." He joins at the same time as Nishant Ranka, founder and president of Handshake Labs, and Wes Field is chief commercial officer for Handshake AI. Article tags News direct to your inbox The agency playbook. The PR industry's most comprehensive listing of firms from every region and specialty.

PR Newswire

Sep 22nd, 2026

Handshake unveils AI Skills Studio for job seekers: NYSE content update.

Handshake unveils AI Skills Studio for job seekers: NYSE content update. Sep 22, 2026, 08:55 ET NYSE issues a pre-market daily advisory direct from the trading floor. NEW YORK, Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) provides a daily pre-market update directly from the NYSE Trading Floor. Access today's NYSE Pre-market update for market insights before trading begins. Ashley Mastronardi delivers the pre-market update on September 22nd * Handshake unveils latest offering to build practical AI skills. * AI Skills Studio offers personalized, project-based 'missions,' in which job seekers work with AI tools used by practitioners. * John Stull, COO + President of Handshake will join NYSE Live to discuss which AI skills employers are seeking in job candidates. * Gatik CEO Gautam Narang to join NYSE Live after Series D funding. * The company says the capital will allow it to expand its efforts around high-frequency regional routes that connect distribution centers and stores. * Gatik says it has completed more than 85,000 fully driverless orders to-date. * Global X NYSE 100 ETF gained more than 2.7% on Monday. * Optimism surrounding Meta's Muse AI agent led the tech giant's shares to jump by more than 11% during Monday's session. * AMD shares jumped by nearly 10%, with the company hitting a $1 trillion market cap for the first time ever. Opening Bell ChargePoint (NYSE: CHPT) celebrates the future of intelligent electrification Closing Bell H.E. Luís Montenegro, Prime Minister of Portugal, Rings The Closing Bell(R) For market insights, IPO activity, and today's opening bell, download the NYSE TV App and check out the NYSE YouTube: TV.NYSE.com and YouTube.com/@NYSEofficial SOURCE New York Stock Exchange

PR Newswire

Sep 22nd, 2026

Handshake launches free AI Skills Studio with OpenAI, Google and Salesforce to upskill job seekers

Handshake has launched AI Skills Studio, a free learning platform offering job seekers hands-on AI training through project-based missions. The platform features projects developed with partners including OpenAI, Google, Salesforce, Figma, and Notion, taking 10 to 45 minutes to complete. Learners work directly with AI tools whilst receiving guidance from an AI Skills Instructor. Completed projects can be added to Handshake profiles and showcased to over one million employers using the platform. The launch addresses a skills gap identified in Handshake's 2026 Network Trends Report, which found 58% of graduating seniors believe they need stronger AI understanding for work, but only 28% say AI has been meaningfully integrated into their education programmes. The platform builds on Handshake's acquisition of Uplimit and is available on both web and mobile.

Corridor Media Group, Inc.

Aug 11th, 2026

Iowa College Foundation partners with career network Handshake.

Iowa College Foundation partners with career network Handshake. The Iowa College Foundation (ICF) announced a new partnership for the state's private universities and colleges through a joint venture with Handshake, a prominent job search network for workforce members in the early days of their careers. An Aug. 11 news release called the new partnership "a significant step in ICF's efforts to strengthen connections between Iowa's independent colleges and universities, employers, and the state's future workforce." Through the partnership, the ICF will utilize Handshake's growing network in order to connect the ICF's member colleges with potential career opportunities. Eighteen of the ICF's 21 member institutions already utilize Handshake, and the new partnership will seek to strengthen the network between Handshake and the universities statewide. The ICF intentionally chose Handshake, rather than create an entire new job search program exclusive to the ICF. "Through this collaboration," said the news release, "ICF will focus on adding statewide value by strengthening employer engagement, sharing workforce insights, and supporting initiatives that benefit member institutions collectively." "Our member institutions are already preparing talented graduates and building strong relationships with employers across Iowa. This partnership with Handshake allows the Iowa College Foundation to amplify those efforts by providing statewide workforce insights and expanding opportunities for collaboration," said Tara K. Connolly, president of the Iowa College Foundation. "Together, we're strengthening the connection between independent higher education and the employers driving Iowa's future." As part of the venture, the ICF will be able to access Handshake's data and workforce insights to assist members of their institutions with understanding the job market. Those insights will then be used to facilitate employer outreach, advocacy efforts, and future initiatives across the state. "We are excited to partner with the Iowa College Foundation as it brings together higher education and employers across the state. By combining Handshake's national network with ICF's statewide leadership, we can help strengthen connections between students, institutions, and Iowa employers," said Kevin Snyder, senior manager of Handshake's EDU partnerships. In turn, the partnership seeks to improve the bond between Iowa's employers, early workforce members, and the ICF's member institutions.

Handshake

Software Engineer 1 - Build Review & Test

About the job