Senior Software Engineer, Handshake
Content and Community, Social Feed
$180-220k
Offers Equity
More information about location
3 days a week in office
College career network and job board
Be an early applicant
College career network and job board
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$180-220k
Offers Equity
More information about location
3 days a week in office
501-1000 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: 7+ years as a full-stack engineer with a strong focus on both backend and frontend development
- Backend skills: Proficiency in backend technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Go, Python, or Node.js
- Frontend skills: Strong experience with modern web technologies like React, JavaScript, or TypeScript, and familiarity with mobile technologies (Swift, React Native)
- Building scalable systems: Experience designing and building complex, scalable systems that handle high traffic and large volumes of user-generated content
- You’ve built and worked in social media or feed-based platforms
- Collaborative mindset: Proven ability to work effectively across teams, including product, design, data, and marketing
- Consumer-focused development: Demonstrated experience in developing user-facing features that prioritize usability, performance, and engagement, with knowledge of social feed and user engagement behaviors
- Mentorship: Experienced mentoring junior engineers, helping them grow both technically and professionally
- Strong technical communication: Ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
What the job involves
- As a Senior Software Engineer on our Content and Community team, you'll play a critical role in enhancing Handshake’s platform for students, job-seekers, and employers
- Your work will directly contribute to shaping the experiences that connect millions of students to career opportunities, all while driving user engagement and fostering a thriving community
- You’ll develop systems that support content creation, discovery, and sharing through dynamic, social-media-style feeds, helping students build valuable professional networks and engage with personalized, relevant content
- This is an opportunity to work on impactful, mission-driven projects that democratize access to opportunities, utilizing cutting-edge technologies and scaling systems to handle millions of users
- As a Senior Software Engineer, your day-to-day will involve collaboration and impact across multiple domains:
- Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner closely with product managers, designers, and other engineers to build and scale new features for feed-driven content, community engagement, and personalized recommendations on the Handshake platform
- Develop impactful content and feed solutions: Build, maintain, and scale high-quality, high-performance backend and frontend systems that support content creation, sharing, and collaboration within the platform
- Shape the roadmap: Utilize your experience to contribute to product roadmaps, help define priorities, and provide technical leadership on key projects that impact feed-driven and content features
- Drive architectural decisions: Own the end-to-end architecture of the content and community platform, designing scalable, reliable, and efficient systems that support millions of users, with a particular focus on social feed performance and relevance
- Mentor and guide: Support junior engineers by providing technical mentorship, reviewing code, and helping foster a culture of collaboration and growth within the team
- Contribute to experimentation and optimization: Help define and experiment with hypotheses to optimize the platform, driving higher user engagement and satisfaction, particularly with features related to content discovery and social feeds
- Ensure quality: Write clean, maintainable, and testable code. Participate in code reviews and provide thoughtful feedback to maintain high-quality standards
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 12 million 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
- 💰Equity and ownership in a fast-growing company
- 🍼16 Weeks of paid parental leave for birth giving parents & 10 weeks of paid parental leave for non-birth giving parents
- 💝Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision policies including LGTBQ+ Coverage. We also provide resources for Mental Health Assistance, Employee Assistance Programs and counseling support
- 💻Handshake offers $500/£360 home office stipend for you to spend during your first 3 months to create a productive and comfortable workspace at home
- 📚Generous learning & development opportunities and an annual $2,000/£1,500 stipend for you to grow your skills and career
- 🏦401k Match: Handshake offers a dollar-for-dollar match on 1% of deferred salary, up to a maximum of $1,200 per year
- 🏝 All full-time US-based Handshakers are eligible for our flexible time off policy to get out and see the world. In addition, we offer 8 standardized holidays, and 2 additional days of flexible holiday time off. Lastly, we have a Summer and Winter #ShakeBreak, two one-week periods of Collective Time Off
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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