Senior Manager, Engineering

Handshake•San Francisco, CA

10d•$260,000 - $290,000•Onsite

About The Position

Handshake is hiring an engineering leader for Handshake Careers to lead a high-impact team building a new, agent-first industry recruiting product. The product is designed to help companies find, evaluate, and reach experienced talent. Recruiters can describe their needs or upload a job description, after which an agent builds an ideal candidate profile, finds matches, refines results based on feedback, and drafts and sends personalized outreach. The position leads the founding team, comprising senior, staff, principal, and mid-level engineers. The product is self-serve from launch, with a path from free use to paid and enterprise tiers. The leader will own the end-to-end product and help shape its architecture, execution, and engineering culture. The role is based in San Francisco, California, with five days per week in the office.

Requirements

At least 3 years of experience managing engineering teams, including teams with senior and staff engineers.
Strong people-management skills, including empathy, high emotional intelligence, and a record of growing engineers’ careers.
Deep technical background and the ability to contribute to architecture and evaluate trade-offs for a new system, even if not coding day to day.
Track record of delivering large, cross-functional projects on aggressive timelines, with sound judgment about what to cut.

Nice To Haves

Zero-to-one experience building a new product or major product surface from scratch, ideally at a startup, mid-size company, or product-led team within a larger company.
Experience with AI/LLM-powered products, agents, or evaluation systems.
Experience with self-serve or product-led growth products, including free-to-paid models or usage-based limits.

Responsibilities

Lead and grow a new engineering team through hiring, coaching, and career development.
Own the end-to-end product, including sign-up and onboarding, agent-driven search and calibration, shortlists, analytics, and tiering.
Shape the architecture early by reviewing technical designs and proposals and setting direction.
Drive execution on an ambitious timeline across a large project and make scope-versus-speed trade-offs with product and design.
Partner closely with product and design, as well as teams responsible for outreach, candidate data, and AI/ML search and retrieval.
Establish the team’s engineering culture, processes, and operating rhythm from the ground up.