Senior Software Engineer, Allocation & Onboarding

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 employ $ers 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 35x 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.

About the Role

As Senior Software Engineer on the Allocation & Onboarding (A&O) team you have the opportunity to own the full stack of impactfrom the experiences our fellows rely on every day to the foundational systems that make those experiences possible. Sitting at the intersection of product engineering and operational scale youll partner closely with Growth Product Operations ML and Platform Infrastructure to translate rapidly evolving business needs into intuitive high-quality product experiences and reliable scalable platform capabilities.

As AI continues to reshape how people learn work and build careers youll help define the consumer experience that sets our fellows up for success while building the flexible technical foundations that enable the business to evolve just as quickly. Whether youre shipping customer-facing features modernizing core infrastructure or designing resilient architectures your work will have a direct and lasting impact on both our users and our ability to innovate at scale.

This is a highly collaborative high-impact role that requires deep partnership across engineering and business teams. Success requires strong technical fundamentals systems thinking and excellent communication along with the judgment to balance rapid execution with thoughtful long-term engineering decisions. Were looking for engineers who are excited to take ownership of meaningful problems influence technical direction and help shape not just what we build but how we build it.

In this role you will:

• Build and own core experiences across the fellow platform including onboarding fellow homepage project opportunities Design and build systems to power fellow allocation helping evolve manual operational workflows into scalable platform capabilities.

• Partner closely with Growth Operations Product and ML to understand business processes and translate them into high-quality technical solutions.

• Lead projects end-to-end from technical design and implementation through rollout and continuous iteration.

• Drive architectural improvements that reduce technical debt and establish scalable service layers as the platform continues to grow.

• Balance speed and quality by making thoughtful engineering tradeoffs that support both immediate business needs and long-term maintainability.

• Collaborate across teams to build reliable secure systems that improve both the fellow and operator experience.

• Mentor other engineers through technical leadership project ownership and strong engineering practices.

Desired Capabilities

• 6 years of professional software engineering experience with a track record of owning production systems end-to-end.

• Experience leading technical projects involving multiple contributors including coordinating work and driving successful execution.

• Strong proactive communication and stakeholder management skills with the ability to translate ambiguous or urgent business needs into effective technical solutions.

• Excellent engineering judgment and systems thinking with experience designing scalable architectures while making pragmatic tradeoffs.

• Experience improving or modernizing existing systems balancing rapid product development with long-term platform health.

• Comfortable operating in fast-moving ambiguous environments where priorities evolve quickly.

• Passion for building products that directly impact customer experience at scale.

Extra Credit

• Experience building marketplace allocation matching or workflow systems.

• Experience with AI-workflows and agentic infrastructure.

• Experience designing service-oriented architectures or platform infrastructure that enables future product growth.

• The ideal candidate has experience building complex systems at scale and is excited to apply that expertise in an AI-driven rapidly evolving product landscape.

Perks

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:

Senior IC