Senior Staff Software Engineer, Handshake

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience, ideally working on social, community, or graph-based products; full stack development experience is a strong plus
• Proven expertise with distributed systems, data modeling for social graphs, and building scalable APIs
• Experience with machine learning or personalization systems, especially in the context of recommendations or feeds
• Track record of collaborating with cross-functional partners (product, design, ML, and other engineering teams) to deliver impactful user-facing features
• Experience designing and building large-scale search, social graph, or entity tagging (ET) systems

Desirable

• At Handshake, we believe in the power of community to unlock opportunity for every student and recent grad
• As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on our Content & Community team, you’ll architect and scale the backbone of our professional graph—powering how users connect, discover, and engage
• Your work will directly shape the way millions of students and employers build networks, discover people and content, and find the right opportunities
• You’ll drive the evolution of our people search, profile, and follow graph, and use cutting-edge AI to deliver personalized people recommendations and content feeds that make every connection meaningful
• Build the Social Graph: Design and implement scalable systems for our follow graph, enabling rich connections and powering people recommendations across Handshake
• Deliver Personalized Experiences: Integrate LLM/AI and machine learning into our profile, people search, and feed experiences—ensuring every user receives relevant recommendations and content
• Power the Feed: Own and evolve the backend for our social and content feeds, working cross-functionally with Staff Engineers and product teams to ensure the feed both reflects and shapes the user’s network and interests
• Cross-Cutting Influence: Collaborate across teams to understand how user activity (e.g., likes, follows, feed engagement) influences recommendations and feed ranking, and vice versa—closing the loop between network growth and content discovery
• Backend Leadership: Drive the design, implementation, and scaling of backend services and APIs that support people search, recommendations, and feed personalization at massive scale