5 hours ago
Base Salary
$208k - $260k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate backend services and APIs for Handshake AI products and internal AI initiatives.
- Develop shared libraries, services, architectural patterns, and developer tooling that reduce duplicated work.
- Improve backend performance, scalability, reliability, and observability.
- Lead database design, data access patterns, query performance, indexing, caching, and data-model evolution.
- Turn recurring product-engineering problems into reusable platform capabilities and patterns.
- Make architectural decisions across mature systems and new services while balancing delivery speed, performance, maintainability, and operational cost.
- Contribute to capabilities for building, evaluating, and operating LLM-powered and agentic systems.
- Partner with Developer Platform, ML, and Cloud Engineering teams on model and service integration, orchestration, evaluation, observability, and failure handling.
- Participate in technical planning, design and code reviews, operational support, and incident response.
- Mentor engineers and help establish backend engineering standards.
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, primarily in backend or platform engineering.
- Experience designing, building, and operating production services and APIs.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, data modeling, service boundaries, backend architecture, reliability, and performance tradeoffs.
- Deep TypeScript and Next.js experience, with the ability to contribute across a full-stack repository.
- Strong relational database experience including schema design, query optimization, indexing, transactions, and database performance diagnosis; PostgreSQL experience is especially relevant.
- Familiarity with Temporal, Redis, Elasticsearch, GraphQL, or event-driven systems.
- Experience operating services in cloud and containerized environments, including technologies such as GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Docker.
- Practical knowledge of LLM-powered systems, including model and tool integration, RAG, agent orchestration, prompt management, evaluation, and observability.
- Ability to independently drive ambiguous projects from problem definition through production rollout.
- Strong communication, collaboration, technical judgment, and preference for maintainable systems.
- Preferred experience includes production ML, LLM, or agent features; LLM orchestration frameworks; internal AI tools or shared AI capabilities; internal platforms and self-service tools; mature backend modernization; and event-driven or high-throughput data systems.
Benefits
- Equity in a fast-growing company and a 401(k) match.
- Paid parental leave, fertility benefits, and parental coaching.
- Medical, dental, vision, and mental health support, plus a wellness stipend.
- Learning stipend and ongoing professional development.
- Remote and office support, including internet, commuting benefits, and free lunch and gym access at the San Francisco office.
- Flexible paid time off, 15 holidays, and two flex days.
- Team outings and referral bonuses.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Handshake
Handshake builds a career network and recruiting platform that connects college students and recent grads with employers, sold as SaaS to universities and subscriptions/solutions to employers. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in San Francisco, it serves 1,600+ educational institutions and over 1 million employers. The company also operates Handshake AI, which partners with frontier AI labs on human data collection and evaluations for model training and post-training workflows.