Software Engineer

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 the role

Location: Sofia, Bulgaria. This role is based out of our Sofia office and is not eligible for full-time remote work.

We’re looking for a Software Engineer to help build the products that enable recruiting teams to find talent, coordinate interviews, and understand their hiring performance. You’ll work across ATS integrations, recruiting analytics, scheduling, and AI sourcing, taking ownership of problems from understanding customer needs through implementation, delivery, and iteration.

This role offers a broad range of engineering challenges: making large datasets faster to query, connecting complex systems, simplifying scheduling workflows, and building intuitive product experiences. You’ll collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and other engineers to make thoughtful technical decisions and deliver reliable, scalable solutions.

Your work will span three connected areas:

• ATS integrations and recruiting analytics: Build and maintain integrations with leading Applicant Tracking Systems so customers can use our product alongside their existing ATS. Help scale systems managing multiple terabytes of relational data and develop Talent Compass, our reporting and analytics product used by all paying customers. You’ll make recruiting data accessible and actionable, helping teams understand funnel performance, identify bottlenecks, track hiring goals, and forecast hiring needs.

• Scheduling: Build tools that make coordinating interviews easier for candidates and hiring teams. This includes calendar and video conferencing integrations, candidate availability and self-scheduling, and scheduling logic that accounts for time zones, interviewer workload, interview focus areas, and preferences. You’ll also improve workflow templates, alerts, rescheduling automations, and analytics to reduce manual work and create a seamless interview experience.

• AI sourcing: Develop customer-facing features for our AI Sourcing Agent, which helps recruiters discover and engage relevant candidates across a pool of more than 800 million profiles. You’ll build experiences that translate hiring needs into tailored searches, incorporate relevant context, and help recruiters act on results. Your focus will be on the product features and systems that bring these AI capabilities to customers, model training is outside the role’s scope.

Depending on the project, you might improve a backend service, extend an integration, optimize a database query, or build a new reporting experience in the frontend. You’ll contribute across these domains as customer needs and priorities evolve.

Our systems span Go, Python, JavaScript, and TypeScript, with technologies including React, GraphQL, REST APIs, Redshift, and Aurora PostgreSQL. You don’t need experience with every part of our stack. We value strong engineering fundamentals, curiosity, and the ability to work effectively across languages and systems.

About you

• You take ownership from end to end. You clarify the problem, identify a practical approach, and follow through on delivery and improvements after launch.

• You have strong engineering fundamentals. You build maintainable software, reason about technical tradeoffs, and consider reliability, performance, and scalability in your decisions.

• You’re comfortable working across the stack. You bring depth in one or more areas and are willing to contribute wherever the problem takes you, from APIs and databases to frontend experiences.

• You approach problems with customer needs in mind. You work with product and design partners to understand workflows, question assumptions, and turn complex requirements into useful solutions.

• You work independently and take initiative. You notice opportunities, investigate issues, and move work forward while seeking input when it will improve the outcome.

• You adapt as priorities change. You can make progress with incomplete information, communicate tradeoffs, and adjust your approach as new context emerges.

• You collaborate openly and respectfully. You share ideas, welcome feedback, and challenge proposals on their merits while respecting the people behind them. You’re comfortable changing your mind when the evidence supports a better approach.

Experience with integrations, data-intensive applications, recruiting technology, or AI-powered product features would be valuable, but is not required.

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary & equity

• 20+5 paid days off

• Additional health insurance

• L&D annual stipend for learning and development opportunities

• Up to 16 weeks of Paid Parental Leave for birthing and non-birthing parents