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 our Coding Pod youll lead the design and development of the data infrastructure that powers frontier AI coding models. This team sits at the intersection of applied machine learning distributed systems and developer toolingbuilding the large-scale benchmark datasets evaluation frameworks and execution environments that determine how state-of-the-art coding models are trained and measured.

Youll own critical platform investments end-to-end from architecting scalable data pipelines and evaluation systems to establishing technical standards for dataset quality reliability and developer workflows. Working closely with ML researchers product managers and engineers youll translate ambiguous research goals into production-ready systems that accelerate model development and improve evaluation quality.

This is an opportunity to shape the infrastructure behind next-generation AI coding systems while solving challenging distributed systems data engineering and developer platform problems at scale.

Location: San Francisco CA

What Youll Do

• Architect and build scalable data infrastructure that powers the generation transformation validation and delivery of large-scale coding datasets.

• Design end-to-end evaluation systems including automated grading benchmarking human-in-the-loop review and quality assurance workflows.

• Lead the technical design of developer-facing tooling and integrations with engineering ecosystems (GitHub CI/CD systems coding agents containerized execution environments).

• Build reliable backend services and APIs that support dataset generation evaluation pipelines and experiment infrastructure.

• Drive architectural decisions around distributed systems workflow orchestration execution environments and data quality.

• Partner closely with ML researchers to translate evolving evaluation methodologies into scalable engineering systems.

• Improve platform reliability observability and performance through monitoring debugging and operational excellence.

• Mentor engineers through technical design reviews code reviews and architectural guidance while helping raise the engineering bar across the team.

• Identify opportunities to standardize reusable infrastructure tooling and evaluation frameworks that accelerate future model development.

What Were Looking For

• 6 years of professional software engineering experience building backend systems data infrastructure or distributed platforms.

• Strong programming skills in Python TypeScript Java or similar languages.

• Experience designing and operating large-scale data pipelines distributed systems or workflow orchestration platforms.

• Strong system design skills with experience making architectural decisions around scalability reliability observability and maintainability.

• Experience building cloud-native systems using AWS GCP or similar cloud platforms.

• Familiarity with containerized execution environments (Docker Kubernetes) and distributed job processing.

• Strong understanding of relational and/or NoSQL databases data modeling and storage systems.

• Ability to navigate ambiguity and translate evolving research or product requirements into scalable engineering solutions.

• Excellent communication skills and a track record of partnering effectively with researchers product managers and cross-functional engineering teams.

• Experience mentoring engineers and leading technical projects from design through production.

Nice to Have

• Experience building ML data infrastructure evaluation frameworks benchmarking systems or dataset generation pipelines.

• Experience with coding agents AI-assisted software development tools or developer productivity platforms.

• Familiarity with GitHub APIs developer ecosystems CI/CD platforms or code execution environments.

• Experience with workflow orchestration frameworks such as Airflow Temporal Dagster or similar distributed job systems.

• Experience building automated testing grading or code execution platforms.

• Background working on infrastructure platform engineering or developer tooling in high-growth environments.

• Familiarity with LLM evaluation coding benchmarks or agentic software engineering systems.

• Passion for advancing AI-powered software development through scalable engineering infrastructure.

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