Director of Engineering, Handshake
Developer Platforms
$260-290k
+ Equity
3 days a week in office (Oakland, CA)
The career platform for Gen Z
Job no longer available
The career platform for Gen Z
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
$260-290k
+ Equity
3 days a week in office (Oakland, CA)
1001+ employees
Company mission
To democratize access to opportunity and ensure any student can build a great career no matter who they know, where they live or what school they attend.
Role
Who you are
- Experience managing other managers
- Proven track record of being able to lead multi-team Engineering organizations by leading through and influencing the leaders that report to you
- Understanding of how to build impactful, diverse teams
- Background in software engineering and experience leading teams at the platform service layer
- Ability to understand the team’s overall technical challenges and architecture while quickly being able to understand technical details when diving deeper into problems
- Ability to effectively gather requirements from Product and Engineering teams to inform roadmaps, while keeping internal stakeholders informed of changes and updates being made at the platform services layer
- Excellent people management skills, focusing on supporting empowerment
- Ability to provide strategic product direction to the Platform Services team while evolving the organization as it rapidly grows
- Passion for helping teams and individuals grow, and for building an inclusive culture and diverse team
What the job involves
- Handshake is hiring a Director of Engineering for our Developer Platform team
- In this role, you will oversee multiple teams building common Handshake services and tools that power the development of the core features for our students, employers, and EDU partners
- You will be responsible for helping the engineering organization achieve better productivity, velocity, and efficiency through the creation of tools, reusable services, design systems, and APIs that can help us continue improving the quality of our codebase and systems so we can continue democratizing, even more, the opportunity for early talent
- Work on many complex technical backend, frontend, and mobile challenges ultimately working toward our vision of democratizing opportunity for students
- Grow and scale a rapidly growing diverse team by hiring top talent
- Build a fast-growing team by defining its culture, processes, and operating model, while heavily influencing the broader Engineering environment and overall Handshake architecture
- Participate and drive business strategy and planning for your entire organization
- Help shape the future of the Handshake R&D organization
- Leading, coaching, and inspiring your engineering leaders and their teams of engineers
- Manage a 22+ person engineering team and rapidly grow the organization at least twofold in the coming year
- Guiding the technical direction of Handshake’s architecture for our existing products, and new products we are developing
- Advocate for architectural enhancements and refactoring initiatives that will ensure the continued scale and growth of Handshake’s products
- Partner closely with key Product, Design, and Engineering leaders across Handshake to enable the success of Handshake’s product development teams
- Represent the Developer Platform Engineering team’s needs at the Engineering leadership level while helping to role out processes and programs across all of Engineering as we scale
- Fostering team growth by ensuring the right processes are in place, facilitating efficient communication, and hiring the right talent to fill in the gaps
- Collaborating across the organization by proactively providing visibility into your teams' work, including celebrating successes, learning from failures, and managing expectations
- Leading with empathy as you help us nurture a culture of growth, inclusion, and belonging
- Help guide the engineering organization to achieve business outcomes
- Ability to demonstrate and track progress on business outcomes with effective definition and execution of a roadmap for all the teams in your organization
Our take
The three founders of Handshake established their company in an attempt to eliminate inequality and make the student hiring landscape fairer. The Handshake platform acts as a LinkedIn for college students, pairing students from every walk of life with more than 650K employers, including the entire Fortune 500, which includes Google and Nike.
The graduate recruitment platform is open to any student with a valid @.edu email address, with more than 17M active users from thousands of colleges and universities. With a student-first philosophy, the company generates revenue from both universities and employers rather than students.
Valued at $3.5B, Handshake has gained traction in a competitive market, although it has strong competition from recruiting giants LinkedIn and Indeed. It stands out, however, by helping students build new relationships and skills, rather than simply making connections to people they already know.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
2% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Jan 2022
$200m
SERIES F
May 2021
$80m
SERIES E
Total funding: $434m
Company benefits
- Health Insurance: Comprehensive medical , dental, and vision coverage
- Fertility and family forming: Through a partnership, Handshake offers comprehensive family benefits, including infertility treatments and a $15K stipend, to its employees.
- LGTBQ+ coverage: All medical plans cover transgender services.
- Mental health: Discounts on a variety of wellness apps and an Employee Assistance Program with access to five free counseling sessions.
- Tax savings: Tax-advantaged benefits to save money on healthcare, dependent care, and other expenses.
- Learning & development: Employees are provided with an annual stipend to use towards professional development, career development workshops, manager trainings, and 1-on-1 coaching through external partnerships
- Community leader support: Employee Resource Group leaders are compensated with a quarterly bonus for the high-impact work the role requires
- Parental leave: Leaves of 16 weeks for birth-giving parents and 10 weeks for non-birth-giving parents; the policy applies to adoptions as well. Handshake also partners to provide one-on-one coaching on preparing for leave and coming back from leave
- Flexible time off: No accrued time off or waiting period to take vacation. Two paid flexible holiday days off to observe holidays that closely align with religious, cultural, and personal needs
- Sabbatical: Paid six-week sabbatical to recharge and reset beginning at six years of continuous, full-time employment, and every four years thereafter
- Volunteer time off: Two days off for social and civil activism, volunteer work, and/or any related activities, including attending and participating in protests
- Life & disability insurance: Essential benefits and automatic coverage with basic life insurance, plus short-term and long-term disability coverage.
- 401k match: Dollar-for-dollar match up to 1% of pay, with a max of $1,200 per year.
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Garrett Lord
(Co-Founder & CEO)Majored in Computer Science at Michigan Technological University. Interned at Palantir Technologies before co-founding Handshake in 2012.
Ben Christensen
(Co-Founder)Graduated from Michigan Technological University with a degree in Computer Networking & Systems Administration. Interned at Target and worked as a Developer at Up and Running Software. Was part of Arbor Networks' ASERT Security Research team.
Scott Ringwelski
(Co-Founder)Attained a degree in Computer Software Engineering from Michigan Technological University. Co-founded Handshake in 2012.
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