Software Engineer I, Handshake AI

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 II at Handshake youll own meaningful pieces of our core productbuilding the systems that power how millions of users discover opportunities connect with employers and launch their careers. Youre past the fundamentals and ready to take on more: driving features end-to-end contributing to technical design and raising the bar for the engineers around you.

Youll work closely with product managers designers and senior engineers to ship full-stack experiences that are reliable scalable and user-obsessed. This is a role for someone who wants real ownership not just tickets.

Location: San Francisco CA 5 days/week in-office

• Own features end-to-end across frontend and backend from technical design through production and iteration

• Build scalable full-stack systems powering core user journeyssearch discovery matching and onboarding flows

• Ship backend APIs async workflows and frontend experiences with a high bar for reliability and performance

• Contribute meaningfully to architecture discussions helping establish patterns the team can build on

• Write clean well-tested maintainable code and actively participate in code reviews

• Partner with product and design to translate ambiguous requirements into polished user experiences

• Identify and address technical debt system reliability gaps and performance bottlenecks proactively

• 1-5 years of professional software engineering experience building full-stack applications

• Strong proficiency in TypeScript across frontend and backend surfaces

• Hands-on experience with modern web stacks (React GraphQL Ruby on Rails)

• Solid command of relational databases (PostgreSQL) and thoughtful data modeling

• Track record of owning features independently and driving them to completion

• Strong communicator who collaborates well with product design and cross-functional partners

• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and making sound tradeoffs in a fast-paced environment

• Experience building AI-powered products conversational interfaces or agentic frameworks (e.g. OpenAI APIs)

• Familiarity with workflow orchestration tools like Temporal or async job systems

• Exposure to marketplaces matching systems or multi-step onboarding flows

• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS GCP) and deployment pipelines

• Background at high-growth or scaling technology companies

• Familiarity with design systems and component libraries for rapid deployment

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

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