Senior Software Engineer, Consumer Experience at Handshake — San Francisco, CA

About Handshake

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 Consumer Experience team, you'll build the products that connect millions of students with employers. You'll drive meaningful technical initiatives, shape the technical direction of the team, and deliver high-quality, scalable solutions that directly impact one of the fastest-growing career platforms in the world.

Your Role

• Lead the design and development of consumer-facing features that enhance user engagement and streamline the student-employer connection process
• Architect and scale distributed systems to support millions of users, ensuring high availability and performance
• Influence technical direction by collaborating with cross-functional teams to align engineering efforts with business goals
• Bring a startup mindset — ship quickly, iterate based on real user feedback, and favor pragmatic solutions that deliver value over premature polish
• Mentor and elevate engineers across the team, fostering a culture of growth and technical excellence
• Champion engineering best practices that raise the bar on product quality and team efficiency

Desired Capabilities

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with a proven track record of owning and delivering large-scale, complex distributed systems
• Ability to work independently on well-scoped technical problems, with growing influence on team-level technical decisions
• Strong proficiency in Go, Python, or Typescript with a focus on maintainable, high-quality production systems
• Solid experience with relational databases, particularly PostgreSQL, including schema design and query performance
• Solid understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and modern system design principles
• Comfort operating with ambiguity and moving fast in a fast-paced, results-oriented environment
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences

Extra Credit

• Background in search, recommendations, ranking systems, or personalization
• Experience building AI-powered agentic systems, including LLM-based applications
• Prior experience in high-growth or rapidly scaling environments

Perks