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 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

Senior Application Security Engineer

At Handshake we believe security should be built into the product not layered on after the fact. Were looking for a Senior Application Security Engineer whos excited to shape how security shows up in the developer experience and enable our engineering teams to ship secure code without compromising on velocity.

About the Role

As a Senior Application Security Engineer youll play a critical role in protecting Handshakes users and their data. Youll work closely with our engineering platform and cloud teams to make the secure way the easy way and embed security directly into how software gets designed written and shipped.

This role is on our Cloud Security squad on our Infra & Platform team and is an engineering forward role. Youll be building systems tools and automation that make secure development the default. Youll bring a modern opinionated perspective on how application security should work in a cloud-native AI-enabled environment.

What Youll Do

• Own and grow key areas of our Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) like threat modeling security reviews and vulnerability management.

• Work collaboratively with and be a trusted partner for engineering teams.

• Eliminate whole classes of vulnerabilities by building secure by default libraries and tools into our platform.

• Raise the bar for security awareness by teaching others and sharing your knowledge

• Design and build developer facing tooling to help engineers identify and fix security issues before they make it to production.

• Scale your impact and security knowledge by teaching others automating processes and leveraging AI and agentic tooling.

• Balance security and speed by using your judgement and expertise to add the right amount of security to our SDLC.

• Help respond to potential security incidents as a member of the security on-call rotation.

What Were Looking For

• 5 - 8 years of experience

• A builder mindset and experience working on large codebases and safely shipping code to production.

• Strong understanding of common application security risks (OWASP Top 10) and how to mitigate them.

• A pragmatic and empathetic approach to security controls that favors guidance over blocking and influence over mandates.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to communicate security risks and tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Experience with threat modeling and risk assessments.

• Familiarity with securing and running software in a major cloud provider.

• Curiosity and a desire to use AI and agenting tooling to scale your and the security teams impact.

Bonus Points

• Experience working in Google Cloud (GCP)

• Experience writing production code in the most popular languages at Handshake: Ruby Typescript and Go.

• Experience building agentic systems to solve security problems.

Why This Role

Youll have real ownership over how application security is built and scaled at Handshake. This role sits at the intersection of security developer experience and AI with the opportunity to define how all three come together. As part of a fast paced and growing business you will regularly get to work on new and interesting problems.

If you care about building systems (not just processes) enjoy working closely with engineers and want to rethink what modern application security looks like wed love to hear from you.

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