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

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.

About the Role

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Pay squad youll own the systems that move money to Handshake AIs global fellow workforce. That includes earnings calculation payout generation Stripe-backed disbursement and the operator tooling that runs every pay cycle. Youll also be helping us build out a much more sophisticated Trust & Safety surface area: KYC and identity verification sanctions and fraud screening and time-tracking audit systems that catch suspicious activity throughout Handshake AI.

This is a role for engineers who treat reliability auditability and resilience as first-class design constraints. Pay cant go down. Ban decisions cant be silent. Webhooks cant be lost. Youll set the bar for how these systems are designed deployed and verified. Our work spans across microservices and integrations with payment and trust and safety providers.

What Youll Do

• Design and build payout and money-movement systems on top of Payment Service Providers including onboarding KYC country and payout-method support webhook reconciliation retries and rate-limit handling with zero-downtime rollout and full auditability for every state change.

• Build out a robust and flexible payment and incentives platform that powers how fellows are compensated rewarded and retained across every project we run.

• Build the Trust & Safety stack: KYC and re-verification flows sanctions and fraud screening ban and suspicious-account state transitions and time-tracking audits over activity time confirmations and pay rates.

• Own operator tooling including the Pay admin dashboard ledger and operations that let our ops team run pay weeks safely.

• Lead end-to-end on schema design migrations and backfills across Postgres and design rollouts that are safe to deploy.

• Set the bar for engineering practices on the squad through system design reviews incident response runbooks and observability and mentor other engineers through code review and architectural guidance.

What Were Looking For

• 5 years of professional software engineering experience with meaningful time spent owning production systems where correctness and uptime matter (payments fintech identity fraud infrastructure or similar high-stakes domains).

• Strong system design fundamentals for highly reliable zero-downtime auditable and resilient systems: expand-contract migrations idempotency retries and backoff dual-writes and backfills append-only audit logs and reconciliation jobs.

• Deep proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL) data modeling and schema evolution under load. You can defend why a given state is or isnt reachable.

• Strong backend skills in Ruby on Rails and/or TypeScript/Node and willingness to work fluently across both.

• Comfort in React for operator and fellow-facing UI.

• Experience designing and operating asynchronous workflows (Temporal Sidekiq or similar) and integrating with third-party APIs that fail in interesting ways (Stripe Deel Hubstaff or equivalents).

• Track record of leading technical projects end-to-end in ambiguous environments with a bias toward shipping behind feature flags and verifying in production.

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management. You can partner with Ops Finance Legal and Compliance and translate their requirements into system invariants.

• Track record of mentoring engineers and raising the engineering bar on a team.

Nice to Have

• Prior experience building production payments payout or money-movement systems

• Background in Trust & Safety fraud KYC/AML sanctions screening or identity verification at scale.

• Experience with event sourcing change-data-capture or audit-log architectures where every state change is reconstructable.

• Experience operating comparable workflow orchestrators for long-running idempotent business processes.

• Experience with regulated or compliance-driven workstreams (1099-NEC issuance OFAC GDPR/data deletion SOC 2 controls).

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 $500 wellness stipend

Growth: $2000 learning stipend ongoing development

Office: Commuting support free lunch and gym in our SF office

Time Off: Flexible PTO 15 holidays 2 flex days

Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses

Required Experience:

Senior IC