Backend Engineer, Quality Platform (AI Data)

Apply; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity in fast-growing company

401(k) match

Parental leave and fertility benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Wellbeing stipend and mental health

Job summary

Handshake is hiring a Software Engineer to join the Quality team in our San Francisco, CA office. You will help build and scale backend systems that assess data quality for frontier AI labs, while developing real-time quality checks and robust data pipelines.

You will design recommendations for quality checks, build cross-team APIs, and collaborate with engineers, researchers, product, and operations to solve complex quality problems.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience building and maintaining backend applications, services, or data-intensive systems.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including system design, testing, debugging, and operational reliability.
• A data-oriented approach to solving problems and measuring whether a system is working.
• Experience working with APIs, databases, data pipelines, or distributed systems.
• The ability to navigate ambiguous problems, break them into manageable pieces, and deliver iteratively.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across technical and non-technical teams.
• A quality-focused mindset and an interest in building systems that make difficult-to-measure outcomes more rigorous.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale backend systems that evaluate and improve the quality of data delivered to frontier AI labs.
• Develop infrastructure for running quality checks in real time and before final customer delivery.
• Help design recommendation systems that select the most effective quality checks for each project.
• Build data pipelines and measurement systems that make complex, subjective quality signals more observable and actionable.
• Develop APIs and platform capabilities that allow other teams and tools to use the Quality platform.
• Help surface Quality capabilities through MCP and other AI-native interfaces used by internal operators.
• Partner with engineers, researchers, product teams, and operations stakeholders to turn ambiguous quality problems into scalable technical solutions.
• Improve the reliability, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of quality workflows as the business grows.

Skills

Backend systems

API design

Distributed systems

Data pipelines

Quality assurance

System design

Testing

Operational reliability

Tools

PostgreSQL

Redis

Job description

Handshake is hiring a Software Engineer to join the Quality team in our San Francisco, CA office. You will help build and scale backend systems that assess data quality for frontier AI labs, while developing real-time quality checks and robust data pipelines.

You will design recommendations for quality checks, build cross-team APIs, and collaborate with engineers, researchers, product, and operations to solve complex quality problems.