Senior Software Engineer, Handshake
Consumer Experience
$200-230k
+ 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
$200-230k
+ 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 in software engineering, ideally with consumer platforms, marketplaces, or social apps at meaningful scale
- Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, Java, or JavaScript, with a track record of delivering robust, production-quality systems
- Strong product sense and user empathy, with experience shaping features that create real value for members and measurable business impact
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) and modern architectures (microservices, event-driven systems, or distributed systems)
- Ability to break down complex problems, make pragmatic technical decisions, and communicate trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with experience mentoring other engineers and contributing to a healthy engineering culture
Desirable
- Experience with AI, chatbots, or conversational interfaces
- Background working with search, recommendations, ranking systems, or other relevance-focused products
What the job involves
- As a Senior Software Engineer, you will drive the design and development of the core experiences that help students find opportunities, spanning search, discovery, jobs, and job search
- You will set technical direction, uplevel engineering quality, and play a key role in scaling our platform and AI-powered experiences
- Design and implement scalable, high-availability systems powering search and discovery experiences across our platform
- Lead the development of agentic AI experiences for students, including our conversational AI agent for resume help, job search, and interview prep
- Work with OpenAI real-time APIs and agentic frameworks to deliver intelligent, conversational features, and guide best practices for their use across teams
- Collaborate with cross-functional partners (Product, Design, Data, GTM) to define, build, and iterate on features that drive member value and engagement
- Own projects end-to-end, from technical design and implementation to rollout and monitoring, ensuring reliability and performance at scale
- Champion engineering excellence through code reviews, technical mentorship, and improving our tooling, standards, and architecture
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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