About Handshake

Handshake is building the career network for the AI economy, backed by the largest and most trusted job network on the internet. As the only three-sided job marketplace connecting 18 million knowledge workers, 1,500 educational institutions, and 1 million employers, Handshake powers career discovery, hiring, and upskilling—from first internships to full-time roles, freelance work to gig work, and beyond.

Founded in 2014, we’ve built the most trusted platform for early talent—owning the college-to-career market and powering nearly every career center. Today we’re building on that foundation to help students and early professionals upskill or reskill for the future.

Now’s a great time to join Handshake. Here’s why:

• Category Leader: Over 92% coverage across US universities & 77% of total US university student population.

• Proven Market Demand: Deep employer partnerships across Fortune 500s and the world’s leading AI research labs.

• World-Class Team: Leadership from Scale AI, Open AI, xAI, Notion, Coinbase, and Palantir, just to name a few.

• Capitalized & Scaling: $434M raised with a $175M+ run rate.

About the Role

As a Senior Engineer on our Feed team, you’ll have the opportunity to play a pivotal role in scaling one of the most impactful areas of our platform – the social feed. This is a high-impact role where you’ll shape the experiences that connect millions of students with career opportunities. You’ll also work closely with data science and machine learning teams to optimize feed relevance, personalization, and ranking, ensuring the right content reaches the right users at the right time.

• Building and Scaling Feed Systems: Scaling feed infrastructure to deliver personalized, relevant content (ranking, retrieval, and recommendations).

• Optimizing and Iterating: Continuously testing and refining the user’s experience on the feed, and improving overall performance, responsiveness, and user engagement.

• Driving Platform Scalability: Designing systems to handle millions of users, including high-traffic, real-time content delivery, and scalable feed/data infrastructure, ensuring high availability and reliability.

• Collaborating with Data and ML Teams: Working closely with data scientists and ML engineers to support their models that power recommendations and personalization.

• Data Management/Flow: Developing data pipelines, enhancing data schemas, and managing data ingestion to leverage real-time, distributed data, ultimately strengthening feed infrastructure and engagement loops.

• Shaping Product Direction: Leveraging data-driven insights to guide product roadmaps, prioritize features, create use cases, recognize limitations, and make impactful decisions that enhance the feed experience.

Desired Capabilities

• Feed and Ranking: Experience building or optimizing social feeds, real-time content delivery systems, feed infrastructure, and data pipelines, ideally focusing on relevance and personalization.

• Scalable Systems Background: Contributing to the design and development of scalable, high-performance backend systems, including building data pipelines to support machine learning models.

• Backend Skills: Proficiency in Go, Elasticsearch, GraphQL, and Ruby on Rails.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: A history of working closely with data, ML, product, and design teams to deliver impactful user experiences.

• Technical Leadership: Experience fostering a culture of technical excellence and supporting the growth of engineering teams.

• Strong Communication Skills: Clearly articulating technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.

Perks

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: Stipends for home office setup, internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF office

🏝 Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days, winter #ShakeBreak where our whole office closes for a week!

🤝 Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses

Explore our mission, values, and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.