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:
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
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.
As a Software Engineer I, on this team, you'll own the full stack of impact — from the experiences our fellows rely on every day to the internal tools and platform capabilities that let our operators run the business with speed and quality. This role sits at the intersection of product engineering, platform infrastructure, and operations, functioning much like an embedded engineering group: you'll partner directly with Growth, Product, Operations, and ML to deeply understand both fellow-facing and operator workflows, and translate them into reliable, scalable systems.
As AI continues to reshape how people learn, work, and build careers, you'll help define the consumer experience that sets our fellows up for success, while also building the internal tooling and technical foundations that let operators — and the business as a whole — move just as fast. Whether you're shipping customer-facing features, architecting internal automation, or modernizing core infrastructure, your work will have a direct and lasting impact on our users, our operators, and our ability to innovate at scale.
This is a highly collaborative, communication-heavy role. Success requires strong technical fundamentals, systems thinking, and high EQ - the ability to translate ambiguous or urgent needs (from fellows, operators, or the business) into clear technical solutions, along with the judgment to balance rapid execution with thoughtful, long-term engineering decisions. We're looking for engineers who are excited to take ownership of meaningful problems, influence technical direction, and shape not just what we build, but how we build it.
In This Role, You Will
Build and own core experiences across the fellow platform, including onboarding, the fellow homepage, and project opportunities, while designing systems that power fellow allocation and evolve manual operational workflows into scalable platform capabilities.
Embed with operators to understand their processes, pain points, and success metrics, and architect internal tools, automations, and workflows that improve operational throughput, accuracy, and visibility.
Partner closely with Growth, Operations, Product, and ML to understand business processes and translate them into high-quality technical solutions.
Lead projects end-to-end — from discovery, scoping, and technical design through implementation, rollout, and continuous iteration.
Drive architectural improvements that reduce technical debt and establish scalable service layers as the platform grows.
Balance speed and quality by making thoughtful engineering tradeoffs that support both immediate business needs and long-term maintainability.
Collaborate across teams to build reliable, secure systems that improve both the fellow and operator experience, and to drive adoption and measurable impact.
Mentor other engineers through technical leadership, project ownership, and strong engineering practices - including in a "player-coach" capacity as the team grows.
Desired Capabilities
1-3+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of owning production systems end-to-end, from requirements through production support.
Experience leading technical projects involving multiple contributors, including coordinating work and driving successful execution.
Strong proactive communication and stakeholder management skills, with high empathy/EQ and the ability to partner deeply with non-engineering teams and translate ambiguous or urgent needs into effective technical solutions.
Excellent engineering judgment and systems thinking - able to design scalable architectures, pick the right level of abstraction, and make pragmatic tradeoffs without over-building.
Experience improving or modernizing existing systems, balancing rapid product development with long-term platform health.
Experience building internal tools, workflow systems, or automation for operations-heavy teams (or analogous customer-embedded roles like FDE/solutions engineering).
Comfortable operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments where priorities evolve quickly.
Passion for building products and tools that directly impact customer and operator experience at scale.
Extra Credit
Experience building marketplace, allocation, matching, or workflow systems.
Experience with AI workflows and agentic infrastructure.
Experience designing service-oriented architectures or platform infrastructure that enables future product growth.
Experience with workflow/backlog systems, intake processes, and operational analytics (instrumentation, dashboards, QA).
Background building tooling for knowledge-work operations (e.g., case management, review/approval flows, data quality tooling).
Excited to apply expertise in complex, at-scale systems to an AI-driven, rapidly evolving product landscape.
Are motivated by solving operational problems that have direct, measurable impact.
Want to be part of a company shaping the future of AI through human data.
Can navigate ambiguity, act with urgency, and keep multiple workstreams moving in parallel.
Perks:
Generous Equity Grant vested over 4 years
Housing Bonus: 1.3 Lakhs spread throughout the first year
Well Defined Performance Bonus ranging between 10 - 100% of base
Medical Insurance Coverage
Food credit for every in person day.
Company size reports differ between sources.
Company data includes TheirStack, LinkedIn observations · last observed Sep 28, 2026.
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