Senior Product Manager, Consumer Growth

Your impact

Handshake’s mission is to democratize access to opportunity by helping every student and early career professional find a great job—no matter where they’re from, what school they attend, or who they know. To achieve that, we must ensure every student discovers Handshake at the right moment in their journey.

As a Senior Product Manager on Consumer Growth, you’ll play a foundational role in expanding our reach. From refining top-of-funnel experiences to scaling the channels that bring in new users, your work will directly connect millions of early career professionals to the networks, communities, and employers that unlock their potential. Handshake is evolving from the college job board to the professional network for Gen Z to navigate the AI economy. And we're growing our business rapidly alongside this shift, from $150m to $250m ARR this year alone. Come join us and be in the driver seat for this fast moving and exciting opportunity to shape the future of work for the next generation – helping early career professionals find their voice, their community and their calling.

Your role

In this role, you’ll build and scale Handshake’s Acquisition Growth function from the ground up—crafting bold, top-of-funnel strategies and launching new growth engines that dramatically expand our reach and bring millions more early-career users into the Handshake community.

You'll own experimentation and channel performance—from SEO, content, referrals, social, influencers, partnerships, and paid campaigns—and improve conversion across the sign-up funnel through to activation. It’s our job to make sure any user that comes across our platform is set up for success and you’ll help them get there. What you’ll own –

• Strategic Roadmap Ownership: Define and own the acquisition roadmap, aligning with cross-functional teams (engineering, design, marketing) to optimize our activation funnels.

• Experimentation & Optimization: Lead rapid testing cycles (A/B/n, landing pages, viral loops), analyze engagement and conversion, prioritizing rapid iterations that drive impact.

• Channel Expansion: Identify and validate new growth channels—organic and paid. Scale the ones with high ROI.

• Referral & Viral Mechanics: Design, test, and optimize referral programs, invite networks, ambassador initiatives, and viral loops.

• Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate closely with performance marketing, brand, content, data science, and product engineering to align acquisition levers.

• Analytics & Insights: Define KPIs and measurement frameworks (CAC, LTV, CTR, CVR, activation), set up dashboards, own tracking and iteration cycles.

Your experience

• Customer expert. You understand the needs of your customer better than anyone else and prioritize them everywhere, grounding your approach in data and research.

• Marketplace Fluent. You think holistically across the different user types and their respective incentives in a marketplace to create “matched”, end-to-end, successful products.

• Strong systems and analytical thinker. Can connect the dots, spot challenges and edge cases, integrate multiple considerations.

• Experience launching and managing a consumer social product with 1M+ active users.

• Expert at using data for tactical and strategic decisioning, goal setting, and iterating quickly.

• Experience running statistically sound experiments with clear hypothesis, analysis and iteration.

• Excellent communicator. Able to present to internal teams, stakeholders, and executive leadership with clarity.

• Cross-functional leadership. Worked deeply with engineering, design, data, and marketing teams to create shared goals and drive urgency across your charter.

Bonus areas of expertise

• Proven expertise in top-of-funnel tactics: registration and activation optimization, SEO/content, referral/viral loops, paid channels, partnerships.

• Passionate about early career Gen Z audiences or educational/social products.

• Mobile-first experience in high-growth consumer tech companies (e.g. LinkedIn, Duolingo, Reddit, TikTok, Discord).

• Experience in marketplaces, network effects, or multi-sided platforms.

• Familiarity with product-led growth strategies and tactics.