---
title: 'Senior Software Engineer, Data Engineer at Handshake'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-data-engineer-handshake-san-francisco-5zy6mw5hy79w'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-14'
---

# Senior Software Engineer, Data Engineer at Handshake

- **Company:** [Handshake](https://feeny.ai/companies/handshake)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-28
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/handshake/6354c156-220b-4323-baaf-143c2b8ab149

## Job description

## About Handshake

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. Why join Handshake now:

- Shape how every career evolves in the AI economy, at global scale, with impact your friends, family and peers can see and feel
- Partner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world’s top educational institutions
- Work together with engineers, scientists, operators, and more from Palantir, Meta, Scale AI, and former YC founders
- Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue

## About the Role

Handshake is hiring a Senior Data Platform Engineer to build and operate the infrastructure that moves data reliably across our career marketplace and AI products. On the Data and ML Platform team, you will own the systems that orchestrate batch workloads and deliver timely, trustworthy data to engineers, analysts, and product teams. This is a hands-on technical leadership role with the opportunity to shape Handshake's data infrastructure strategy. You will set the technical direction for our workflow orchestration platform (Airflow), data ingestion, data pipelines, our data warehouse (BigQuery) and streaming data infrastructure. You'll collaborate closely with ML engineers, data scientists, and other engineers to maximize velocity on our data platform. This infrastructure will also support Handshake's growing AI development, from model and agent workflows to evaluation and production data access.

## What you'll do

- Lead the technical direction and roadmap for our Airflow and Astronomer platform while owning its production operations: deployment, DAG packaging, scheduler and worker capacity, upgrades, observability, and incident response.
- Build paved paths for authoring, testing, deploying, and operating workflows, including reusable operators, CI checks, local and staging environments, and clear runbooks.
- Design and operate streaming and change data capture pipelines using tools such as Pub/Sub, Dataflow or Beam, and Datastream to serve analytics and product use cases.
- Make data delivery resilient to retries, duplicates, schema changes, late events, backfills, and replay; define useful latency, freshness, and reliability targets.
- Improve the cloud foundation behind data workloads with Kubernetes, Terraform, IAM, secrets, CI/CD, and cost-aware capacity management.
- Lead cross-team design decisions on data contracts, interfaces, and operational ownership; mentor engineers and align application, analytics, ML, and cloud partners on scalable platform approaches.
- Participate in on-call, troubleshoot production failures across systems, and turn incidents into durable improvements.
- Build dependable data and orchestration foundations for AI workloads, including batch inference, evaluation datasets, and agent-facing data.

Desired Capabilities

- Strong software engineering skills in Python and experience building and operating production data or distributed systems.
- Deep hands-on Airflow experience beyond writing DAGs: scheduling and execution behavior, deployment, scaling, upgrades, monitoring, and debugging failures.
- Experience with event-driven or streaming data infrastructure, including a message broker or managed event bus and a stream processing system.
- Sound understanding of CDC, delivery guarantees, idempotency, ordering, schema evolution, and recovery or replay in production pipelines.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure as code; comfortable working with containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, access controls, and production observability.
- A track record of leading ambiguous infrastructure initiatives: setting technical direction, making pragmatic architecture tradeoffs, and driving adoption across teams.
- Clear communication and a track record of partnering across teams while owning systems through production support.

Extra Credit

- GCP services such as Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Datastream, BigQuery, GKE, and Cloud Storage.
- Astronomer, Apache Beam, Terraform, Spacelift, Datadog, dbt, Spark or Dataproc.
- Supporting both batch and low-latency consumers, including product-facing data services or ML features.
- Experience supporting ML or AI workloads such as inference pipelines, reproducible evaluations, or governed data access.

## Perks

Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supported — and thrive at work and in life. The below benefits are for full-time US employees. 🎯 Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company 💰 Financial Wellness: 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coaching 🍼 Family Support: Paid parental leave, fertility benefits, parental coaching 💝 Wellbeing: Medical, dental, & vision, mental health support, $500 wellness stipend 📚 Growth: $2,000 learning stipend, ongoing development 💻 Remote & Office: Internet, commuting, & free lunch/gym in our SF office 🏝 Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days 🤝 Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses Explore our mission, values, & comprehensive US benefits at[joinhandshake.com/careers](http://joinhandshake.com/careers).

## About Handshake

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Handshake is the career network for the AI economy, connecting job seekers with internships, full-time roles, freelance gigs, and AI training work through a three-sided marketplace.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series F; total funding $434M across 6 rounds)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2014
- **Founders**: Garrett Lord (CEO), Ben Christensen, Scott Ringwelski

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Career platform / Job marketplace / AI workforce infrastructure
- **Target customers**: B2C (job seekers, from students to experienced professionals) and B2B (employers including 100% of Fortune 500 and all foundational AI labs; also educational institutions)
- **Mission**: Expand access and improve outcomes for job seekers, helping the workforce stay ahead in the AI economy.

## Products & Services
- **Handshake Core Platform**: A three-sided marketplace connecting 25 million knowledge workers, 1,600+ schools, and 1 million employers. Features dynamic profiles, intelligent job matching, and interactive skill-building.
- **Handshake AI Enterprise**: AI-powered tools for employers and job seekers, including AI-driven matching, safety features, and pay management.
- **AI Trainer Gigs**: Paid, flexible, remote work for individuals to train and evaluate AI models (e.g., AI Evaluation Specialist, up to $40/hr) – no prior AI experience required.
- **Handshake Network**: Community events, career advice, and networking for students, experts, and professionals in AI and other fields.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding $434M (6 rounds); annual revenue $56.5M (LinkedIn estimate)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Board includes representatives from General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, EQT Ventures, True Ventures, and Niantic. Strategic partners include 100% of the Fortune 500 and foundational AI labs.
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount at 5,272 employees (+708.8% YoY per LinkedIn); 1M+ companies on platform; 25M users; expansion into AI trainer gig economy; new roles in HAI (Handshake AI Enterprise) such as Applied AI Engineer, AI Platform Engineer, and Forward Deployed Engineer.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Network effects**: The only three-sided marketplace linking students, employers, and educational institutions at scale.
- **AI-first positioning**: Deep integration of AI into job matching, skill-building, and new freelance training roles – creating a unique ecosystem for the AI economy.
- **Trusted by elite institutions**: 1,600+ partner schools and every Fortune 500 company provides unparalleled reach into early-career talent.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI economy expansion**: Building the “career network for the AI economy” – expanding beyond college students to all knowledge workers, and adding AI training gigs as a new revenue and engagement stream.
- **Product innovation**: Heavy investment in Handshake AI Enterprise (HAI), including AI matching, safety, and pay infrastructure.
- **Global scaling**: Offices in San Francisco, New York, UK, and Bangalore; operating in 32 countries.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Values include “Students first,” “Leave nothing to chance,” “Own the outcome,” “Invent and reinvent,” and “Olympic pace.” Emphasis on ownership, urgency, and constant evolution.
- **Remote/Hybrid policy**: Many roles are based in San Francisco or New York, but some positions (e.g., Trust & Safety Specialist, Support Specialist) are remote in the US. Recent openings show both office and remote options.
- **Benefits**: Health & wellness support, financial support, time off, modern offices with meals, snacks, and social activities. Strong focus on career growth and learning.
- **Career growth**: Rapid headcount growth suggests ample internal mobility; roles range from engineering (ML, AI, data) to customer success, partnerships, and product management.

## Sources
1. [joinhandshake.com/about](https://joinhandshake.com/about/)
2. [joinhandshake.com/careers](https://joinhandshake.com/careers/)
3. [linkedin.com/company/team-handshake](https://www.linkedin.com/company/team-handshake)
4. [joinhandshake.com](https://joinhandshake.com/)

## Other roles at Handshake

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- [Member of Technical Staff, Coding Agents](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-coding-agents-handshake-san-francisco-3enam33akj0c) — San Francisco, CA
- [Partnerships Lead - Integrations & Ecosystem](https://feeny.ai/job/partnerships-lead-integrations-ecosystem-handshake-united-states-tspy61x42312) — United States
- [Member of Technical Staff, Post-Training (India)](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-post-training-india-handshake-india-cxbfffpyvn0v) — India
- [Member of Technical Staff, AI Engineering (India)](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-ai-engineering-india-handshake-india-ntg51nad631j) — India
- [Senior Marketing Manager - Fellows](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-marketing-manager-fellows-handshake-san-francisco-jc7g3q2bdryk) — San Francisco, CA
- [HR, Manager - India](https://feeny.ai/job/hr-manager-india-handshake-india-vxw9svjvsrhj) — India
- [Forward Deployed Engineer I](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-i-handshake-india-v1y7tgkpw6yz) — India
- [Marketing Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-lead-handshake-nashville-ft3br6nsqvnz) — Nashville, TN
- [Machine Learning Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-handshake-san-francisco-030gj3b0c6ts) — San Francisco, CA