Manager, Engineering

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.

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a high-impact engineering team within Handshake Careers. You’ll own the engineering of a new, agent-first product for industry recruiting: the future of how companies find, evaluate, and reach experienced talent.

Recruiting teams work through hours of manual searching, filtering, and outreach. Our product replaces that with an agent. A recruiter describes who they need, or uploads a job description, and the agent builds an ideal candidate profile, finds matches, refines results from feedback, and drafts and sends personalized outreach.

You’ll lead the founding team, a mix of senior, staff, principal, and mid-level engineers. The product is self-serve from day one, starting free and growing into paid and enterprise tiers.

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  Lead and grow a new engineering team, including senior, staff, and principal engineers, through hiring, coaching, and career development

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  Own the end-to-end product: sign-up and onboarding, agent-driven search and calibration, shortlists, analytics, and tiering

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  Shape the architecture early. Review technical designs and proposals and set direction

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  Drive execution on an ambitious timeline across a large project, and make clear trade-offs with product and design on scope versus speed

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  Partner closely with product and design, and with the teams behind outreach, candidate data, and AI/ML search and retrieval

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  Establish the team’s engineering culture, processes, and operating rhythm from the ground up

• 3+ years experience managing engineering teams, including teams that include senior and staff engineers

• Strong people management: high EQ, empathy, and a record of growing engineers’ careers

• Deep technical background. You can contribute to architecture and evaluate trade-offs on a new system, even if you no longer code day to day

• A track record of delivering large, cross-functional projects on aggressive timelines, with good judgment about what to cut

• Zero-to-one experience: building a new product or major surface from scratch, ideally at a startup, a mid-size company, or a product-led team inside a larger one

• Experience with AI/LLM-powered products, agents, or evaluation systems

• Experience with self-serve or product-led growth products (free-to-paid, usage-based limits) is a plus