Senior Software Engineer, Employer

Handshake•San Francisco, CA

3d•$220,000 - $250,000•Onsite

About The Position

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Employer team, you'll help build the next generation of hiring on Handshake. How can AI help employers discover talent they would otherwise miss? How can we turn hours of manual recruiting into intuitive, effective workflows? You'll tackle these kinds of problems with real ownership—taking initiatives from an early idea through architecture, launch, and the next iteration. The team's work spans AI-powered sourcing, automated outreach, and recruiting agents, alongside the monetization and growth experiences that help employers succeed on our platform. You'll bring strong product instincts and a technical judgment to a space where the opportunity goes beyond improving an existing workflow: it's about rethinking how employers find and connect with talent. This is a role for an engineer who wants to shape what gets built, not just how it's built. You'll partner closely with product, design, and data, work alongside experienced engineers, and lead meaningful initiatives end to end. You'll move quickly, run A/B tests, learn from customer feedback and real-world results, and build scalable products whose impact shows up in real hiring outcomes. This job is 5 days a week onsite in our San Francisco, CA office.

Requirements

Proven experience owning complex products from idea through launch and iteration
Strong full-stack engineering skills, with proficiency in Ruby on Rails, Go, or Python
Experience designing scalable architectures and reliable distributed systems
Strong product judgment, connecting technical decisions to customer needs and business outcomes
Comfort with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and rapid experimentation
Pragmatic technical decision-making and a high bar for maintainable, production-quality code
Clear communication, collaborative leadership, and confidence to challenge assumptions and surface blockers
Comfort using AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor and Claude

Nice To Haves

Experience building AI-powered products, LLM applications, or recruiting agents
Background in product-led growth, A/B testing, and improving activation or conversion
Experience with Stripe integrations, payments, billing, or monetization
Experience building recruiting tools, SaaS integrations, or employer-facing products
Familiarity with promoted-content systems, attribution, or customer-facing analytics

Responsibilities

Own high-impact full-stack initiatives from idea to launch, shaping product direction and driving technical execution
Build smarter hiring experiences, with opportunities across AI-powered sourcing, automated outreach, and recruiting integrations
Run A/B tests and use customer feedback to improve employer engagement, conversion, and hiring outcomes
Develop monetization and growth experiences that help employers get more value from Handshake
Architect scalable, reliable systems and make pragmatic tradeoffs across frontend, backend, and integrations
Partner with product, design, and data to turn ambiguous customer needs into intuitive, effective products
Elevate engineering quality through thoughtful code reviews, mentorship, and ownership of production systems