Senior Software Engineer, Notifications

Handshake•San Francisco, CA

4d•$225,000 - $250,000•Onsite

About The Position

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Growth team, you'll build the products that connect millions of students with employers. You'll drive meaningful technical initiatives, shape the technical direction of the team, and deliver high-quality, scalable solutions that directly impact one of the fastest-growing career platforms in the world. This role is onsite 5 days a week in our SF office.

Requirements

5+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally with exposure to consumer-facing or growth-focused products
Strong fundamentals in backend and/or full-stack development (adjust based on your stack — e.g., Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, React, or equivalent)
Experience building or working within experimentation platforms (e.g., feature flagging, A/B testing frameworks, statistical significance tooling)
A track record of shipping iteratively and learning from real user data, not just building to spec
Strong collaboration skills — you can work fluidly with PMs, designers, and data scientists, and can communicate trade-offs clearly
A growth mindset: curiosity about why something worked or didn't, not just whether it shipped

Nice To Haves

Background in notification, acquisition, user authentication/authorization at scale
Background in mobile growth (iOS/Android) alongside web
Familiarity with LLM-powered features or AI-assisted product experiences
Prior experience in high-growth or rapidly scaling environments

Responsibilities

Design, build, and ship experiments across the user funnel — onboarding, activation, retention, notifications — with a strong bias toward measurable impact
Architect and scale distributed systems to support millions of users, ensuring high availability and performance
Partner with Product Managers and Data Scientists to translate growth hypotheses into technical designs and shippable experiments
Mentor and elevate engineers across the team, fostering a culture of growth and technical excellence
Balance speed and rigor — know when to move fast with a lightweight test and when a feature needs production-grade durability