Senior Software Engineer, Handshake
Feed Relevance
$180-220k
Offers Equity
More information about location
3 days a week in office
The career platform for Gen Z
Job no longer available
The career platform for Gen Z
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
$180-220k
Offers Equity
More information about location
3 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
- Feed and Ranking: Experience building or optimizing social feeds, ranking pipelines, real-time content delivery systems, feed infrastructure, and data pipelines, ideally focusing on relevance and personalization
- Scalable Systems Background: Contributing to the design and development of scalable, high-performance backend systems, including building data pipelines to refine and optimize machine learning models
- Backend Skills: Proficiency in Go, Elasticsearch, GraphQL, and search indexing
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: A history of working closely with data, ML, product, and design teams to deliver impactful user experiences
- Technical Leadership: Experience fostering a culture of technical excellence and supporting the growth of engineering teams
- Strong Communication Skills: Clearly articulating technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences
What the job involves
- As a Senior Engineer on our Feed infrastructure team, you’ll have the opportunity to play a pivotal role in scaling one of the most impactful areas of our platform – the social feed
- This is a high-impact role where you’ll shape the experiences that connect millions of students with career opportunities
- You’ll work closely with data science and machine learning teams to optimize feed relevance, personalization, and ranking, ensuring the right content reaches the right users at the right time
- As a Senior Engineer, your day-to-day will involve collaboration and impact across multiple domains:
- Building and Scaling Feed Systems: Scaling feed infrastructure to deliver personalized, relevant content (ranking, retrieval, and recommendations)
- Collaborating with Data and ML Teams: Working closely with data scientists and ML engineers to build and deploy models that power recommendations, personalization, and feed infrastructure
- Optimizing and Iterating: Continuously testing and refining models, and improving overall performance, responsiveness, and user engagement
- Driving Platform Scalability: Designing systems to handle millions of users, including high-traffic, real-time content delivery, and scalable feed/data infrastructure, ensuring high availability and reliability
- Data Management/Flow: Developing data pipelines, enhancing data schemas, and managing data ingestion to leverage real-time, distributed data, ultimately strengthening feed infrastructure and engagement loops
- Shaping Product Direction: Leveraging data-driven insights to guide product roadmaps, prioritize features, create use cases, enable experimentation, recognize limitations, and make impactful decisions that enhance the feed experience
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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