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 Staff Software Engineer on the Consumer Experience team youll build the products that connect millions of students with employers. Youll drive meaningful technical initiatives shape the technical direction of the team and deliver high-quality scalable solutions that directly impact one of the fastest-growing career platforms in the world.

Your Role

• Lead the design and development of consumer-facing features that enhance user engagement and streamline the student-employer connection process

• Architect and scale distributed systems to support millions of users ensuring high availability and performance

• Influence technical direction by collaborating with cross-functional teams to align engineering efforts with business goals

• Mentor and elevate engineers across the team fostering a culture of growth and technical excellence

• Champion engineering best practices that raise the bar on product quality and team efficiency

Desired Capabilities

• 8 years of software engineering experience with a proven track record of owning and delivering large-scale complex systems

• Demonstrated experience operating at a staff-level scope influencing technical direction across multiple teams

• Expertise in building and scaling distributed systems preferably within consumer platforms or social products

• Strong proficiency in Go Python or JavaScript with a focus on maintainable high-quality production systems

• Solid understanding of cloud platforms (AWS Azure or GCP) and modern system design principles

• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences

• Experience mentoring senior engineers and elevating engineering culture

Extra Credit

• Background in search recommendations ranking systems or personalization at scale

• Experience with user identity knowledge graphs including entity resolution and real-time inference

• Experience building AI-powered systems including LLM-based applications

• Prior experience in high-growth or rapidly scaling environments

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:

Staff IC