Senior Software Engineer, Handshake
$200-235k
+ Equity
5 days a week in office
The career platform for Gen Z
Be an early applicant
The career platform for Gen Z
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$200-235k
+ Equity
5 days a week in office
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
- 5+ years of experience as a full-stack engineer, confident driving architectural decisions across both frontend and backend
- Strong proficiency in TypeScript, React, Ruby on Rails, SQL, and PostgreSQL
- Demonstrated success collaborating with partners in product, design, and analytics to define, build, and ship great products and experiences
- Experience leading large-scale projects from idea through high-quality delivery
- A track record of implementing complex, scalable, and highly available services that power high-traffic platforms
- Skilled at balancing technical trade-offs with product and business priorities, demonstrating sound judgment and product sense
- Empathetic mentor and teammate, proactive in giving and receiving feedback to drive individual and team growth
- Excellent communicator, able to clearly articulate technical decisions and business rationale to audiences of varying technical knowledge levels
Desirable
- Experience with AI-powered products, agentic frameworks, conversational interfaces, or real-time APIs (e.g., OpenAI)
- Background building platform systems for user acquisition, identity, authentication, or fraud prevention
- Experience with workflow orchestration tools such as Temporal, or matching/marketplace systems
- Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) and deployment pipelines at scale
- Ownership mentality with a high degree of accountability for delivering outcomes that move both the product and business forward
- Background in consumer SaaS products at scale, particularly in growth or monetization
What the job involves
- As a Senior Software Engineer, you will drive the design and development of the systems and experiences that power Handshake’s core product surfaces—from search and discovery to user acquisition, onboarding, and AI-powered tools
- You’ll lead large projects end-to-end, make high-impact architectural decisions, and set the technical standard for your team
- This is a high-ownership role where you’ll collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and analytics partners to define, build, and ship products that deliver measurable business impact
- You’ll also mentor engineers, shape the team’s roadmap, and balance product innovation with operational excellence—quality, reliability, and on-call health
- Lead large projects through all stages—from brainstorming and requirements, through architectural design and experimentation, to execution and release
- Architect and build scalable, high-quality full-stack systems powering core user journeys including search, discovery, matching, onboarding, and identity infrastructure
- Drive technical decisions across frontend and backend, balancing trade-offs between product goals, user experience, and system reliability
- Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, designers, data analysts, and other engineers to ensure products align with business goals and user needs
- Lead by example in maintaining high standards of quality in your own work and in the feedback you provide during code reviews and architecture discussions
- Use both technical expertise and business acumen to influence the team’s roadmap, prioritizing product innovation alongside operational health initiatives like quality control and on-call reliability
- Mentor and unblock teammates to accelerate delivery and elevate the team’s overall effectiveness
- Take ownership of significant initiatives, including projects that require coordination across multiple engineers and stakeholders
- Contribute to organization-level technical enhancements and help establish engineering best practices
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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