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 the Role

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Growth 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.

This role is onsite 5 days a week in our SF office.

Your Role

• Design build and ship experiments across the user funnel onboarding activation retention notifications with a strong bias toward measurable impact

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

• Partner with Product Managers and Data Scientists to translate growth hypotheses into technical designs and shippable experiments

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

• Balance speed and rigor know when to move fast with a lightweight test and when a feature needs production-grade durability

Desired Capabilities

• 5 years of professional software engineering experience ideally with exposure to consumer-facing or growth-focused products

• Strong fundamentals in backend and/or full-stack development (adjust based on your stack e.g. Ruby on Rails GraphQL React or equivalent)

• Experience building or working within experimentation platforms (e.g. feature flagging A/B testing frameworks statistical significance tooling)

• A track record of shipping iteratively and learning from real user data not just building to spec

• Strong collaboration skills you can work fluidly with PMs designers and data scientists and can communicate trade-offs clearly

• A growth mindset: curiosity about why something worked or didnt not just whether it shipped

Extra Credit

• Background in notification acquisition user authentication/authorization at scale

• Background in mobile growth (iOS/Android) alongside web

• Familiarity with LLM-powered features or AI-assisted product experiences

• 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:

Senior IC