Senior Software Engineer, Growth Platform — Scale Impact

Handshake; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

401(k) match

Parental leave

Medical/dental/vision

Wellness stipend

Learning stipend

Remote & Office benefits

Flexible PTO

Holidays + flex days

Team outings & referrals

Job summary

Handshake is seeking a Senior Software Engineer on the Growth team to build systems connecting millions of students with employers. You will drive technical initiatives, shape direction, and deliver scalable solutions for one of the world's fastest-growing career platforms.

This role is onsite 5 days a week in our SF office, collaborating with PMs, data scientists, and engineers to ship experiments and improve onboarding, activation, and retention.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong backend and/or full-stack fundamentals (Rails, GraphQL, React).
• Experience with experimentation platforms and A/B testing.
• Track record shipping iteratively based on real user data.
• Strong collaboration with PMs, data scientists; clear trade-offs.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship experiments across the user funnel — onboarding, activation, retention, notifications — with a strong bias toward measurable impact.
• Architect and scale distributed systems to support millions of users, ensuring high availability and performance.
• Partner with Product Managers and Data Scientists to translate growth hypotheses into technical designs and shippable experiments.
• Mentor and elevate engineers across the team, fostering a culture of growth and technical excellence.
• Balance speed and rigor — know when to move fast with a lightweight test and when a feature needs production-grade durability.

Skills

5+ years exp

Backend/full-stack

Ruby on Rails

GraphQL

React

Tools

PostgreSQL

Redis

Docker

Job description

Handshake is seeking a Senior Software Engineer on the Growth team to build systems connecting millions of students with employers. You will drive technical initiatives, shape direction, and deliver scalable solutions for one of the world's fastest-growing career platforms.

This role is onsite 5 days a week in our SF office, collaborating with PMs, data scientists, and engineers to ship experiments and improve onboarding, activation, and retention.