Backed by Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed.
About the role
Handshake is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join Backend Platform, with an initial focus on supporting Handshake AI (HAI) and internal AI initiatives. You will build and maintain backend services, shared platform capabilities, and developer tooling that support HAI and internal AI initiatives. The work centers on core backend platform concerns—service architecture, APIs, data systems, performance, reliability, and developer experience—in an area making increasing use of LLMs and agents.
What they're looking for
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, primarily in backend or platform engineering
- Experience designing, building, and operating production services and APIs
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, data modeling, service boundaries, common backend architecture patterns, and reliability and performance tradeoffs
- Strong experience with relational databases, including schema design, query optimization, indexing, transactions, and diagnosing database-related performance problems. Experience with PostgreSQL is especially relevant
- Familiarity with backend technologies such as Temporal, Redis, Elasticsearch, GraphQL, or event-driven systems
- Experience operating services in cloud and containerized environments. Our broader platform uses technologies including GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Docker
More about this role
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.
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...
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