Senior Software Engineer, Operator Tooling 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 Handshake AI

About the Role

As a Senior Software Engineer on Operating Tooling, you’ll build internal products and automation that help Handshake’s operators run the business at high quality and speed. This team functions like an embedded/consulting engineering group: you’ll partner directly with operators, learn their workflows deeply, and enable new operational capabilities.

This role is highly collaborative and communication-heavy. Success requires strong technical fundamentals plus high EQ—someone who can translate ambiguous operational needs into reliable systems, and iteratively ship improvements that stick.

In this role, you will:

• Embed with operators to understand processes, pain points, and success metrics; translate them into clear technical requirements and deliverables.
• Architect and build internal tools, automations, and workflows that improve operational throughput, accuracy, and visibility.
• Lead projects end-to-end: discovery, scoping, technical design, implementation, rollout, and iteration.
• Balance speed and quality by making thoughtful tradeoffs, ensuring maintainability, and building with operational reliability in mind.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional partners (operators, engineering, product) to drive adoption and measurable impact.
• Mentor other engineers and help establish strong engineering practices for an internal-tools environment.

Desired Capabilities

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with comfort owning systems end-to-end (from requirements through production support).
• Strong communication skills and stakeholder management; able to partner deeply with non-engineering teams and operate with high empathy/EQ.
• Experience building internal tools, workflow systems, or automation for operations-heavy teams (or analogous customer-embedded roles like FDE / solutions engineering).
• Strong engineering judgment: can design scalable systems, pick the right level of abstraction, and avoid over-building.
• Track record of delivering iterative, high-leverage improvements in ambiguous environments.

Extra Credit

• Experience with workflow/backlog systems, intake processes, and operational analytics (instrumentation, dashboards, QA).
• Comfort operating in a “player-coach” environment (mix of hands-on building plus lightweight coordination/mentorship as the team grows).
• Background building tooling for knowledge-work operations (e.g., case management, review/approval flows, data quality tooling).

Perks