Your impact

As a Senior Software Engineer on our Content and Community team, youll play a critical role in enhancing Handshake’s platform for students, job-seekers, and employers. Your work will directly contribute to shaping the experiences that connect millions of students to career opportunities, all while driving user engagement and fostering a thriving community. You’ll develop systems that support content creation, discovery, and sharing through dynamic, social-media-style feeds, focusing on performance, personalization, ranking, and relevance, helping students build valuable professional networks and engage with timely, high-value content.

This is an opportunity to work on impactful, mission-driven projects that democratize access to opportunities, utilizing cutting-edge technologies and scaling systems to handle millions of users.

Your role

As a Senior Software Engineer, your day-to-day will involve collaboration and impact across multiple domains:

• Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner closely with product managers, designers, and other engineers to build and scale new features for feed-driven content, community engagement, and personalized recommendations on the Handshake platform.
• Develop impactful content and feed solutions: Build, maintain, and scale high-quality, high-performance backend and frontend systems that support content creation, sharing, and collaboration within the platform, including content retrieval, ranking, and delivery mechanisms.
• Shape the roadmap: Utilize your experience to contribute to product roadmaps, help define priorities, and provide technical leadership on key projects that impact feed-driven and content features, with attention to engagement loops and system scalability.
• Drive architectural decisions: Own the end-to-end architecture of the content and community platform, designing scalable, reliable, and efficient systems that support millions of users, with a particular focus on feed infrastructure, performance, and ranking logic.
• Mentor and guide: Support junior engineers by providing technical mentorship, reviewing code, and helping foster a culture of collaboration and growth within the team.
• Contribute to experimentation and optimization: Help define and experiment with hypotheses to optimize the platform, driving higher user engagement and satisfaction, particularly with features related to feed personalization, content discovery, and ranking systems.
• Ensure quality: Write clean, maintainable, and testable code. Participate in code reviews and provide thoughtful feedback to maintain high-quality standards.

Your experience

We’re seeking candidates who bring:

• Experience: 7+ years as a full-stack engineer with a strong focus on both backend and frontend development.
• Backend skills: Proficiency in backend technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Go, Python, or Node.js.
• Frontend skills: Strong experience with modern web technologies like React, JavaScript, or TypeScript, and familiarity with mobile technologies (Swift, React Native).
• Building scalable systems: Experience designing and building complex, scalable systems that handle high traffic and large volumes of user-generated content—including feeds, ranking pipelines, or real-time content delivery.
• Feed experience: You’ve built or worked on social media or feed-based platforms and understand the technical and product complexities behind real-time, personalized feeds.
• Collaborative mindset: Proven ability to work effectively across teams, including product, design, data, and marketing.
• Consumer-focused development: Demonstrated experience in developing user-facing features that prioritize usability, performance, and engagement, with knowledge of social feed and user engagement behaviors.
• Mentorship: Experienced mentoring junior engineers, helping them grow both technically and professionally.
• Strong technical communication: Ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Compensation range

$180,000 - $220,000

For cash compensation, we set standard ranges for all U.S.-based roles based on function, level, and geographic location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. In order to be compliant with local legislation, as well as to provide greater transparency to candidates, we share salary ranges on all job postings regardless of desired hiring location. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including geographic location as well as candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

About us

Handshake is the career platform for Gen Z. With a community of over 17 million students, alumni, employers, and career educators, Handshake’s network is where career advice and discovery turn into first, second, and third jobs. Nearly 1 million companies use Handshake to build their future workforce—from Fortune 500 to federal agencies, school districts to startups, healthcare systems to small businesses. Handshake is built for where you’re going, not where you’ve been.

When it comes to our workforce strategy, we’ve thought deeply about how work-life should look at Handshake. With our hybrid-work model, employees benefit from collaboration and shared team experiences three days per week in our vibrant offices, and enjoy the flexibility of remote work two days per week (unless noted in the specific job posting). Handshake is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, London, and Berlin.

What we offer

At Handshake, well give you the tools to feel healthy, happy and secure.

Benefits below apply to US employees in full-time positions.

• 💰 Equity and ownership in a fast-growing company.
• 🍼 16 Weeks of paid parental leave for birth giving parents & 10 weeks of paid parental leave for non-birth giving parents.
• 💝 Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision policies including LGTBQ+ Coverage. We also provide resources for Mental Health Assistance, Employee Assistance Programs and counseling support.
• 📚 Generous learning & development opportunities and an annual $2,000 stipend for you to grow your skills and career.
• 💰 Financial coaching through Origin to help you through your financial journey.
• 🛜 Monthly internet stipend and a brand new MacBook to allow you to do your best work.
• 🚃 Monthly commuter stipend for you to expense your travel to the office (for office-based employees).
• 🥗 Free lunch provided 3x a week across all offices.
• 🤝 Referral bonus to reward you when you bring great talent to Handshake.
• 🏦 401k Match: Handshake offers a dollar-for-dollar match on 1% of deferred salary, up to a maximum of $1,200 per year.
• 🏝 All full-time US-based Handshakers are eligible for our flexible time off policy to get out and see the world. In addition, we offer 13 standardized holidays, and 2 additional days of flexible holiday time off. Lastly, we have a Winter ## ShakeBreak, a one-week period of Collective Time Off.
• 💻 Handshake offers $500 home office stipend for you to spend during your first 3 months to create a productive and comfortable workspace at home.
• 🍼 Family support: Parental leave coaching and support provided by Parentaly. We partner with Maven Clinic to provide a lifetime coverage up to $15K for expenses related to fertility and family forming!
• 💰 Lifestyle Savings Account: We offer you an annual stipend of $500 to use for purchases such as fitness classes, gym memberships, work-from-home setup, and more.

Looking for more? Explore our mission, values and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.

Handshake is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or reasonable accommodation, please let your recruiter know during initial communications.