Software Engineer, Fellow Experience

Handshake•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

As a Software Engineer on the Fellow Experience team, you will build and scale full-stack systems that power the middle-of-funnel experience for fellows, from project discovery through successful onboarding. You’ll work across frontend and backend surfaces to improve how fellows discover projects, apply, get matched, and onboard successfully. Your work will directly impact fellow volume, match quality, and conversion as we scale toward more intelligent automatic allocations. This is a product-focused, full-stack role with real customer impact, close collaboration with product and design, and clear growth paths toward senior technical ownership. The Fellow Experience team owns critical user journeys including the landing page experience for project invitations and applications, onboarding flows (confidentiality agreements, video/camera checks, educational programs, reading materials), project-specific assessments and recordings, and the internal tools that support manual matching.

Requirements

2+ years of professional software engineering experience
Experience building full-stack applications, with comfort working across frontend and backend
Strong proficiency in TypeScript
Experience with modern web stacks (Next.js, tRPC, GraphQL, PostgreSQL)
Familiarity with asynchronous workflows or background job systems
Product-oriented mindset with a focus on user experience and business outcomes
Strong communication skills and comfort collaborating cross-functionally
Growth mindset and eagerness to take on increasing responsibility

Nice To Haves

Experience with workflow orchestration tools such as Temporal
Exposure to matching systems, marketplaces, or multi-step onboarding flows
Background at high-growth or scaling technology companies
Interest in AI-driven products, human-in-the-loop systems, or data platforms

Responsibilities

Build and iterate on full-stack features that support fellow matching, onboarding, and readiness for project work
Contribute to the evolution of our automatic allocations system by implementing matching logic, workflows, and product improvements with guidance from senior engineers
Design and ship backend APIs, asynchronous workflows, and frontend user experiences that are reliable, scalable, and intuitive
Partner closely with product managers and designers to deliver polished, end-to-end user experiences
Write high-quality, maintainable code while balancing speed and correctness
Debug and resolve issues related to onboarding flows, matching outcomes, and system reliability
Participate in code reviews and contribute to improving engineering standards and best practices
Grow toward increased technical ownership by learning from senior engineers on the team