Senior Software Engineer, Growth

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 0to~1B run rate and pay ~$60M to over 30K individuals every month.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Growth team, you'll build the products that connect millions of students with employers. You'll drive meaningful technical initiatives, shape the technical direction of the team, and deliver high-quality, scalable solutions that directly impact one of the fastest-growing career platforms in the world.

• 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

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally with exposure to consumer-facing or growth-focused products

• Strong fundamentals in backend and/or full-stack development (adjust based on your stack — e.g., Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, React, or equivalent)

• Experience building or working within experimentation platforms (e.g., feature flagging, A/B testing frameworks, statistical significance tooling)

• A track record of shipping iteratively and learning from real user data, not just building to spec

• Strong collaboration skills — you can work fluidly with PMs, designers, and data scientists, and can communicate trade-offs clearly

• A growth mindset: curiosity about why something worked or didn't, not just whether it shipped

• Background in notification, acquisition, user authentication/authorization at scale

• Background in mobile growth (iOS/Android) alongside web

• Familiarity with LLM-powered features or AI-assisted product experiences

• Prior experience in high-growth or rapidly scaling environments