Partnerships Lead - Integrations & Ecosystem

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.

Handshake only works for employers if it fits the stack they already run — their ATS, their CRM, and the data that powers both. As Partnerships Lead - Integrations & Ecosystem, you'll be the single-threaded owner of that ecosystem: setting our multi-year integration and data-partnership strategy, deciding which ATS integrations we build next, keeping existing partners healthy and growing, and bringing on the data partners that make our employer products smarter. You'll operate as the senior-most partnerships voice in the room — shaping the product roadmap with engineering and product leaders, aligning go-to-market, and representing Handshake to our most important partners. You'll turn "we should integrate with X" into a signed deal, a shipped integration, and measurable adoption. This is a hands-on senior IC role — equal parts strategy and execution.

• Set our ATS integration strategy — map the landscape (Workday, Greenhouse, iCIMS, SuccessFactors, Oracle, Lever, Ashby) against our customers and pipeline to decide where to build, buy, or partner, and in what order

• Source, negotiate, and close integration and data partnerships end to end — marketplace listings, API access, co-marketing, rev share, and data licensing

• Own our existing ATS and data partners — run QBRs, track integration health and adoption, and resolve issues before customers feel them

• Grow third-party data partnerships that make our employer and candidate data richer and more reliable for product and go-to-market teams

• Translate partner needs for product and engineering — write clear requirements, scope API and data-sharing work, and keep integration launches on schedule

• Turn partnerships into a revenue lever — equip sales and CS to sell integrations and measure partner-influenced pipeline

• A track record of owning an integrations or ecosystem-partnerships area end to end — ideally having built or scaled it — in HR tech (ATS, HCM, recruiting software) or sales tech (CRM, sales engagement, sales intelligence)

• A history of sourcing, negotiating, and closing large, complex, strategic partnerships: API integrations, marketplace listings, co-marketing, or data licensing deals

• Working knowledge of how ATS and CRM integrations work in practice — APIs, webhooks, unified-API providers (Merge, Kombo), data mapping, and sync failures

• A strong existing network at ATS vendors, HCM platforms, and data providers you can activate on day one

• The judgment and executive presence to align senior product, engineering, and go-to-market leaders and influence without authority

• Comfort operating with ambiguity — you build the strategy and do the work, without a team under you

• Clear writing and sharp judgment on commercial terms, data privacy, and compliance

• Experience structuring data licensing or data-sharing agreements, from either side of the table

• Time at an ATS vendor, a unified-API company, or a marketplace team

• Familiarity with early-career or university recruiting