Senior Software Engineer
Handshake
Senior Software Engineer
Handshake
Connects talent with jobs and AI training work
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
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Employer team, you'll help build the next generation of hiring on Handshake. How can AI help employers discover talent they would otherwise miss? How can we turn hours of manual recruiting into intuitive, effective workflows? You'll tackle these kinds of problems with real ownership—taking initiatives from an early idea through architecture, launch, and the next iteration.
The team's work spans AI-powered sourcing, automated outreach, and recruiting agents, alongside the monetization and growth experiences that help employers succeed on our platform. You'll bring strong product instincts and technical judgment to a space where the opportunity goes beyond improving an existing workflow: it's about rethinking how employers find and connect with talent.
This is a role for an engineer who wants to shape what gets built, not just how it's built. You'll partner closely with product, design, and data, work alongside experienced engineers, and lead meaningful initiatives end to end. You'll move quickly, run A/B tests, learn from customer feedback and real-world results, and build scalable products whose impact shows up in real hiring outcomes.
This job is 5 days a week onsite in our San Francisco, CA office.
Your Role
Own high-impact full-stack initiatives from idea to launch, shaping product direction and driving technical execution
Build smarter hiring experiences, with opportunities across AI-powered sourcing, automated outreach, and recruiting integrations
Run A/B tests and use customer feedback to improve employer engagement, conversion, and hiring outcomes
Develop monetization and growth experiences that help employers get more value from Handshake
Architect scalable, reliable systems and make pragmatic tradeoffs across frontend, backend, and integrations
Partner with product, design, and data to turn ambiguous customer needs into intuitive, effective products
Elevate engineering quality through thoughtful code reviews, mentorship, and ownership of production systems
Desired Capabilities
Proven experience owning complex products from idea through launch and iteration
Strong full-stack engineering skills, with proficiency in Ruby on Rails, Go, or Python
Experience designing scalable architectures and reliable distributed systems
Strong product judgment, connecting technical decisions to customer needs and business outcomes
Comfort with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and rapid experimentation
Pragmatic technical decision-making and a high bar for maintainable, production-quality code
Clear communication, collaborative leadership, and confidence to challenge assumptions and surface blockers
Comfort using AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor and Claude
Extra Credit
Experience building AI-powered products, LLM applications, or recruiting agents
Background in product-led growth, A/B testing, and improving activation or conversion
Experience with Stripe integrations, payments, billing, or monetization
Experience building recruiting tools, SaaS integrations, or employer-facing products
Familiarity with promoted-content systems, attribution, or customer-facing analytics
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.
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.
Explore more opportunities at Handshake