Associate Software Engineer, Operator Experience

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 1600 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. Weve 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 worlds 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.

As a Software Engineer on Operating Tooling youll build internal products and automation that help Handshakes operators run the business at high quality and speed. This team functions like an embedded/consulting engineering group: youll partner directly with operators learn their workflows and help ship new operational capabilities.

This role is collaborative and communication-heavy. Success requires solid technical fundamentals plus good EQsomeone who can take clearly-scoped operational needs and turn them into reliable well-built systems iterating based on feedback from operators and senior engineers.

In this role you will:

• Work with operators (with support from senior engineers) to understand processes and pain points and help translate them into technical requirements.

• Build internal tools automations and workflows that improve operational throughput accuracy and visibility.

• Own well-scoped projects or features end-to-end: implementation testing rollout and iteration with guidance on discovery and technical design.

• Write maintainable well-tested code and follow established engineering practices for the internal-tools environment.

• Collaborate with cross-functional partners (operators engineering product) to gather feedback and drive adoption of the tools you build.

• Seek feedback proactively and grow your technical judgment through code review and pairing with more senior engineers.

• 0-2 years of software engineering experience with some experience owning features or small projects from implementation through production support.

• Good communication skills and comfort working with non-engineering stakeholders.

• Exposure to building internal tools workflow systems or automation (through internships previous roles or side projects) is a plus.

• Growing engineering judgment: able to write clean scalable code with guidance and eager to learn how to make good abstraction and design tradeoffs.

• Curiosity and adaptability in ambiguous environments with a track record of shipping incremental improvements.

• Exposure to workflow/backlog systems intake processes or operational analytics (instrumentation dashboards QA).

• Interest in operating in a fast-paced embedded-engineering environment.

• Coursework projects or prior experience touching knowledge-work operations tooling (e.g. case management review/approval flows data quality tooling).

Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supportedand 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 wellness stipend
Growth: 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 Experience:

IC