Machine Learning Engineer I, Network

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 with world-class AI labs Fortune 500 companies and the worlds leading educational institutions

• Work alongside engineers scientists operators and more from Palantir Meta Scale AI and former YC founders

• Help build a massive fast-growing business with billions in revenue

Human data is the core infrastructure of AI advancement. Frontier AI labs currently improve model capabilities through various data-intensive post-training techniques. We believe spending on AI training data will increase by 35x over the next few years and continue growing as models expand into new domains. Handshake AI supports all frontier AI labs working on their most complex data challenges at significant scale.

Handshake is hiring a Machine Learning Engineer for the Network and Handshake AI Marketplace Relevance team. AI is transforming how students navigate their careers and were committed to developing innovative responsible AI-powered solutions that connect students with meaningful career opportunities.

In this role youll build and improve the machine learning systems that power job search and recommendations user understanding personalized notifications and core embedding models across the Handshake platform. Youll work closely with experienced machine learning engineers data scientists product managers and software engineers to develop models run experiments and deploy reliable ML solutions to production.

The team works with retrieval and ranking approaches including graph-based models bi-encoders semantic cross-encoders and multi-stage rankers supported by a data platform containing billions of data points. The team is also exploring emerging areas such as generative retrieval and post-training. Your work will directly contribute to improving marketplace outcomes while supporting Handshakes commitment to explainability fairness and responsible AI.

• Build and improve machine learning models for search recommendations notifications user understanding and embeddings

• Develop test and deploy models and supporting services in a production environment

• Work with large datasets to create features train models and evaluate performance

• Contribute to retrieval ranking personalization and experimentation systems

• Monitor production models and help improve their quality reliability latency and scalability

• Partner with product engineering and data science to translate business and user needs into practical ML solutions

• Participate in technical design discussions code reviews and team planning

• Use experimentation and marketplace metrics to measure the impact of your work

• Contribute to team standards and best practices for model development evaluation and deployment

• 3 years of professional experience in machine learning data science software engineering or a related field

• Proficiency in Python and experience with ML frameworks such as scikit-learn PyTorch or TensorFlow

• Experience building evaluating and deploying machine learning models in production

• Familiarity with one or more relevant areas such as recommendations search personalization ranking NLP deep learning or LLMs

• Understanding of core ML concepts including classification regression ranking feature engineering and model evaluation

• Experience working with data pipelines experiment tracking model monitoring or other parts of the ML lifecycle

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to write reliable maintainable code

• Experience working collaboratively with engineers data scientists product managers and other cross-functional partners

• Ability to break down moderately complex problems evaluate tradeoffs and deliver solutions with support from senior team members

• A focus on measurable results and improving the end-user experience

• Experience with embedding-based retrieval multi-stage ranking graph-based models or recommender systems

• Experience working with large-scale datasets or high-traffic cloud-based production systems

• Familiarity with generative retrieval LLM evaluation or post-training techniques

• Interest in explainable AI fairness or responsible machine learning

• Clear communication skills and an interest in contributing to team practices and technical standards

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

The benefits below are for full-time US employees.

• Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company

• Financial Wellness: 401(k) match competitive compensation and financial coaching

• Family Support: Paid parental leave fertility benefits and parental coaching

• Wellbeing: Medical dental and vision coverage mental health support and a $500 wellness stipend

• Growth: $2000 learning stipend and ongoing development

• Remote & Office: Internet and commuting support plus free lunch and gym access in our SF office

• Time Off: Flexible PTO 15 holidays and two flex days

• Connection: Team outings and referral bonuses

Explore our mission values and comprehensive US benefits at Experience:

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