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 Staff Software Engineer on our Content & Community team, you’ll architect and scale the backbone of our professional graph—powering how users connect, discover, and engage. Your work will directly shape the way millions of students and employers build networks, discover people and content, and find the right opportunities. You’ll drive the evolution of our people search, profile, and follow graph, and use cutting-edge AI to deliver personalized people recommendations and content feeds that make every connection meaningful.

• Build the Social Graph: Design and implement scalable systems for our follow graph, enabling rich connections and powering people recommendations across Handshake.
• Deliver Personalized Experiences: Integrate LLM/AI and machine learning into our profile, people search, and feed experiences—ensuring every user receives relevant recommendations and content.
• Power the Feed: Own and evolve the backend for our social and content feeds, working cross-functionally with Staff Engineers and product teams to ensure the feed both reflects and shapes the user’s network and interests.
• Cross-Cutting Influence: Collaborate across teams to understand how user activity (e.g., likes, follows, feed engagement) influences recommendations and feed ranking, and vice versa—closing the loop between network growth and content discovery.
• Backend Leadership: Drive the design, implementation, and scaling of backend services and APIs that support people search, recommendations, and feed personalization at massive scale.

Desired Capabilities

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience, ideally working on social, community, or graph-based products; full stack development experience is a strong plus.
• Proven expertise with distributed systems, data modeling for social graphs, and building scalable APIs.
• Experience with machine learning or personalization systems, especially in the context of recommendations or feeds.
• Track record of collaborating with cross-functional partners (product, design, ML, and other engineering teams) to deliver impactful user-facing features.
• Experience designing and building large-scale search, social graph, or entity tagging (ET) systems.

Extra Credit

• Deep experience with people search, profile systems, or social graph infrastructure.
• Familiarity with LLM/AI integration into user-facing features.
• Experience designing or scaling recommendation engines or ranking systems.
• Understanding of how user interactions (likes, follows, shares) influence feed and recommendation algorithms.
• Prior experience in social, or high-scale consumer platforms.
• Contributions to open-source graph or ML frameworks.

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.