What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Software Engineer, Backend Platform position at Handshake?
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
Human data is the core infrastructure to AI advancement. Frontier AI labs currently improve model capabilities with various data-intensive post-training techniques. We believe that data spend for AI training will increase by 3-5x in the next few years and continue for much longer as models take on new domains. Handshake AI supports all of the frontier AI labs, working on their most complex data at the largest scale.
The Role
Join our Backend Platform team as a Senior Software Engineer, where you will be integral in owning and advancing the foundational systems that support every product team. This role offers the chance to engage with genuine platform-scale architecture challenges, tackling tasks such as optimizing Elasticsearch queries and redesigning CI pipelines. You will have a direct impact on how students connect with career opportunities through high-impact modernization work.
You Have
Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supported—and thrive at work and in life.
The below benefits are for full-time US employees.
🎯 Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company
💰 Financial Wellness: 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coaching
🍼 Family Support: Paid parental leave, fertility benefits, parental coaching
💝 Wellbeing: Medical, dental, and vision, mental health support, $500 wellness stipend
📚 Growth: $2,000 learning stipend, ongoing development
💻 Remote & Office: Internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF office
🏝 Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays 2 flex days
🤝 Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses
Explore our mission, values, and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.
Compensation Range: $200K - $235K
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
Human data is the core infrastructure to AI advancement. Frontier AI labs currently improve model capabilities with various data-intensive post-training techniques. We believe that data spend for AI training will increase by 3-5x in the next few years and continue for much longer as models take on new domains. Handshake AI supports all of the frontier AI labs, working on their most complex data at the largest scale.
The Role
Join our Backend Platform team as a Senior Software Engineer, where you will be integral in owning and advancing the foundational systems that support every product team. This role offers the chance to engage with genuine platform-scale architecture challenges, tackling tasks such as optimizing Elasticsearch queries and redesigning CI pipelines. You will have a direct impact on how students connect with career opportunities through high-impact modernization work.
- Optimize backend systems like Elasticsearch and CI pipelines to improve performance and reliability across our platform.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to influence technical direction through effective communication and well-scoped proposals.
- Lead cross-team projects and drive RFCs to align technical initiatives with organizational goals.
- Develop and maintain internal developer tooling, libraries, and APIs to streamline engineering workflows and enhance productivity.
- Participate in modernization efforts such as migration paths and system conversions to shape the evolution of our platform.
You Have
- 5 years of backend engineering experience, with expert-level proficiency in Ruby on Rails.
- Experience in building internal developer tooling and improving developer experience.
- Demonstrated technical leadership through project management, mentorship, or influencing technical direction.
- Strong collaboration skills with the ability to work across product and platform teams.
- Interest in leveraging AI technologies to enhance developer experience.
- Experience with AI-powered developer tools or AI integration in workflows.
- Background in developer experience infrastructure, such as devcontainers and CLI tooling.
- DevOps/Infrastructure expertise, ideally with GCP.
- Familiarity with Docker, service-oriented architecture, and backend languages like Go or TypeScript.
Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supported—and thrive at work and in life.
The below benefits are for full-time US employees.
🎯 Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company
💰 Financial Wellness: 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coaching
🍼 Family Support: Paid parental leave, fertility benefits, parental coaching
💝 Wellbeing: Medical, dental, and vision, mental health support, $500 wellness stipend
📚 Growth: $2,000 learning stipend, ongoing development
💻 Remote & Office: Internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF office
🏝 Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays 2 flex days
🤝 Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses
Explore our mission, values, and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.
Compensation Range: $200K - $235K
Salary : $200,000 - $235,000