Software Engineer I, Promotions

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.

As a Software Engineer I, you'll build the products and systems that help employers reach relevant talent and help job seekers discover opportunities they might otherwise miss. Promotions powers promoted content across Handshake's job search, feed, digest, inbox, and promoted messages—connecting employer investment to meaningful hiring outcomes.

You'll work across the full stack, from customer-facing experiences to distributed services and the data that makes results measurable. The team's platform spans auctions, promoted-content delivery, event tracking, applicant attribution, and analytics. You'll help make these systems scalable, reliable, and understandable, so employers can see the value of their promotions and job seekers encounter relevant opportunities.

This is a hands-on product engineering role with meaningful end-to-end ownership. You'll partner closely with product, design, data, and other engineering teams to turn ambiguous problems into well-scoped solutions, make pragmatic architectural decisions, and carry projects from early design through launch and iteration. You'll join an experienced team where you can shape what gets built while raising the quality of the systems behind it.

• Own full-stack Promotions initiatives from design through launch, partnering with product, design, and data to improve employer and job-seeker experiences.

• Build scalable, reliable systems for promoted-content delivery, auctions, event tracking, attribution, and analytics.

• Strengthen applicant attribution and customer-facing analytics so employers can understand and trust their promotion results.

• Use customer feedback and performance data to measure impact and guide product iteration.

• Raise engineering quality through production ownership, testing, observability, thoughtful code reviews, and mentorship.

• 1-3 years of full-stack engineering experience.

• Proven ownership of complex software projects, with strong product judgment and comfort navigating ambiguity.

• Proficiency in Ruby on Rails, Go, or Python.

• Experience designing scalable distributed systems, with sound judgment around reliability, performance, and data consistency.

• Clear communication, collaborative technical leadership, and a pragmatic approach to quality and delivery.

• Strong debugging skills and attention to detail, with experience investigating production issues across services and data flows.

• Comfort using AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor and Claude while maintaining code quality and correctness.

• Experience with advertising technology, auctions, marketplaces, or recommendation systems.

• Background in attribution, analytics, event-driven architectures, or data pipelines.

• Experience building employer-facing or SaaS products and using experimentation to improve customer outcomes.