Senior Software Engineer, Allocation & Onboarding

Apply; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

401(k) match

Parental leave

Wellbeing benefits

Learning stipend

Remote & Office access

Flexible PTO

Holidays

Team outings

Job summary

Handshake is seeking a Senior Software Engineer on the Allocation & Onboarding team to own end-to-end experiences for fellows, from onboarding to scalable platform infrastructure. You’ll collaborate with Growth, Product, Operations, ML, and Platform to translate evolving business needs into high-quality technical solutions and reliable systems.

In this role you will shape the consumer experience for fellows and drive architectural improvements while maintaining balance between rapid delivery and

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience leading technical projects with multiple contributors.
• Strong proactive communication and stakeholder management.
• Excellent engineering judgment and systems thinking for scalable architectures.
• Experience modernizing systems while balancing speed and maintainability.
• Comfortable operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.
• Passion for building products that scale customer experience.

Responsibilities

• Build and own core experiences across the fellow platform, onboarding, and opportunities.
• Collaborate with Growth, Operations, Product, and ML to translate processes into solutions.
• Lead projects end-to-end from design to rollout.
• Drive architectural improvements to reduce debt and enable growth.
• Balance speed and quality with pragmatic engineering decisions.
• Collaborate to build reliable, secure systems for fellows and operators.
• Mentor other engineers through leadership and best practices.

Skills

Senior SWE

Technical leadership

Communication skills

Systems thinking

Architectural design

Job description

About 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.

About the Role

As Senior Software Engineer on the Allocation & Onboarding (A&O) team, you have the opportunity to own the full stack of impact—from the experiences our fellows rely on every day to the foundational systems that make those experiences possible. Sitting at the intersection of product engineering and operational scale, you'll partner closely with Growth, Product, Operations, ML, and Platform Infrastructure to translate rapidly evolving business needs into intuitive, high-quality product experiences and reliable, scalable platform capabilities.

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 building the flexible technical foundations that enable the business to evolve just as quickly. Whether you're shipping customer-facing features, modernizing core infrastructure, or designing resilient architectures, your work will have a direct and lasting impact on both our users and our ability to innovate at scale.

This is a highly collaborative, high-impact role that requires deep partnership across engineering and business teams. Success requires strong technical fundamentals, systems thinking, and excellent communication, 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 help 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, fellow homepage, project opportunities, design and build systems to power fellow allocation, helping evolve manual operational workflows into scalable platform capabilities.
• 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 technical design and implementation through rollout and continuous iteration.
• Drive architectural improvements that reduce technical debt and establish scalable service layers as the platform continues to grow.
• 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.
• Mentor other engineers through technical leadership, project ownership, and strong engineering practices.

Desired Capabilities

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of owning production systems end-to-end.
• Experience leading technical projects involving multiple contributors, including coordinating work and driving successful execution.
• Strong proactive communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to translate ambiguous or urgent business needs into effective technical solutions.
• Excellent engineering judgment and systems thinking, with experience designing scalable architectures while making pragmatic tradeoffs.
• Experience improving or modernizing existing systems, balancing rapid product development with long-term platform health.
• Comfortable operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments where priorities evolve quickly.
• Passion for building products that directly impact customer 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.
• The ideal candidate has experience building complex systems at scale and is excited to apply that expertise in an AI-driven, rapidly evolving product landscape.

Perks

• 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, wellness stipend.
• Growth: Learning stipend, ongoing development.
• Remote & Office: Internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF office.
• Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days.
• Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses.

Explore our mission, values, and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.