Senior Software Engineer, Employer

About Handshake Handshake was founded on a simple belief that everyone deserves a path to a great career, regardless of where they went to school or who they know. Today, we power 25 million job seekers, 1 million+ employers, and 1,600 educational institutions. In 2025, we started Handshake AI and built the fastest-growing AI data business in history. We work directly with frontier AI lab researchers to create evaluations, publish benchmarks, and push the boundary of data. We’ve grown from $0 to ~$1B run rate and pay ~$60M to over 30K individuals every month. Why join Handshake now: Shape how every career evolves in the AI economy, at global scale, with impact your friends, family and peers can see and feel Partner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world’s top educational institutions Work together with engineers, scientists, operators, and more from Palantir, Meta, Scale AI, and former YC founders Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue About the Role As a Senior Software Engineer on the Employer team, you'll help build the next generation of hiring on Handshake. How can AI help employers discover talent they would otherwise miss? How can we turn hours of manual recruiting into intuitive, effective workflows? You'll tackle these kinds of problems with real ownership—taking initiatives from an early idea through architecture, launch, and the next iteration. The team's work spans AI-powered sourcing, automated outreach, and recruiting agents , alongside the monetization and growth experiences that help employers succeed on our platform. You'll bring strong product instincts and technical judgment to a space where the opportunity goes beyond improving an existing workflow: it's about rethinking how employers find and connect with talent. This is a role for an engineer who wants to shape what gets built, not just how it's built . You'll partner closely with product, design, and data, work alongside experienced engineers, and lead meaningful initiatives end to end. You'll move quickly, run A/B tests, learn from customer feedback and real-world results, and build scalable products whose impact shows up in real hiring outcomes. This job is 5 days a week onsite in our San Francisco, CA office. Your Role Own high-impact full-stack initiatives from idea to launch, shaping product direction and driving technical execution Build smarter hiring experiences, with opportunities across AI-powered sourcing, automated outreach, and recruiting integrations Run A/B tests and use customer feedback to improve employer engagement, conversion, and hiring outcomes Develop monetization and growth experiences that help employers get more value from Handshake Architect scalable, reliable systems and make pragmatic tradeoffs across frontend, backend, and integrations Partner with product, design, and data to turn ambiguous customer needs into intuitive, effective products Elevate engineering quality through thoughtful code reviews, mentorship, and ownership of production systems Desired Capabilities Proven experience owning complex products from idea through launch and iteration Strong full-stack engineering skills, with proficiency in Ruby on Rails, Go, or Python Experience designing scalable architectures and reliable distributed systems Strong product judgment, connecting technical decisions to customer needs and business outcomes Comfort with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and rapid experimentation Pragmatic technical decision-making and a high bar for maintainable, production-quality code Clear communication, collaborative leadership, and confidence to challenge assumptions and surface blockers Comfort using AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor and Claude Extra Credit Experience building AI-powered products, LLM applications, or recruiting agents Background in product-led growth, A/B testing, and improving activation or conve