Senior Software Engineer, Backend Platform

Handshake•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Join our Backend Platform team as a Senior Software Engineer, where you will be integral in owning and advancing the foundational systems that support every product team. This role offers the chance to engage with genuine platform-scale architecture challenges, tackling tasks such as optimizing Elasticsearch queries and redesigning CI pipelines. You will have a direct impact on how students connect with career opportunities through high-impact modernization work.

Requirements

5+ years of backend engineering experience, with expert-level proficiency in Ruby on Rails.
Experience in building internal developer tooling and improving developer experience.
Demonstrated technical leadership through project management, mentorship, or influencing technical direction.
Strong collaboration skills with the ability to work across product and platform teams.
Interest in leveraging AI technologies to enhance developer experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience with AI-powered developer tools or AI integration in workflows.
Background in developer experience infrastructure, such as devcontainers and CLI tooling.
DevOps/Infrastructure expertise, ideally with GCP.
Familiarity with Docker, service-oriented architecture, and backend languages like Go or TypeScript.

Responsibilities

Optimize backend systems like Elasticsearch and CI pipelines to improve performance and reliability across our platform.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams to influence technical direction through effective communication and well-scoped proposals.
Lead cross-team projects and drive RFCs to align technical initiatives with organizational goals.
Develop and maintain internal developer tooling, libraries, and APIs to streamline engineering workflows and enhance productivity.
Participate in modernization efforts such as migration paths and system conversions to shape the evolution of our platform.