Senior Software Engineer, Operator Experience

About the role

ABOUT HANDSHAKE

Handshake was founded on a simple belief that everyone deserves a path to a great career, regardless of where they went to school or who they know. Today, we power 25 million job seekers, 1 million+ employers, and 1,600 educational institutions.

In 2025, we started Handshake AI and built the fastest-growing AI data business in history. We work directly with frontier AI lab researchers to create evaluations, publish benchmarks, and push the boundary of data. We’ve grown from $0 to ~$1B run rate and pay ~$60M to over 30K individuals every month.

Why join Handshake now:

- Shape how every career evolves in the AI economy, at global scale, with impact your friends, family and peers can see and feel

- Partner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world’s top educational institutions

- Work together with engineers, scientists, operators, and more from Palantir, Meta, Scale AI, and former YC founders

- Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue

About Handshake AI

Human data is the core infrastructure to AI advancement. Frontier AI labs currently improve model capabilities with various data-intensive post-training techniques. We believe that data spend for AI training will increase by 3-5x in the next few years and continue for much longer as models take on new domains. Handshake AI supports all of the frontier AI labs, working on their most complex data at the largest scale.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As a Senior Software Engineer on Operating Experience, you’ll build internal products and automation that help Handshake’s operators run the business at high quality and speed. This team functions like an embedded/consulting engineering group: you’ll partner directly with operators, learn their workflows deeply, and enable new operational capabilities.

This role is highly collaborative and communication-heavy. Success requires strong technical fundamentals plus high EQ—someone who can translate ambiguous operational needs into reliable systems, and iteratively ship improvements that stick.

In this role, you will:

- Embed with operators to understand processes, pain points, and success metrics; translate them into clear technical requirements and deliverables.

- Architect and build internal tools, automations, and workflows that improve operational throughput, accuracy, and visibility.

- Lead projects end-to-end: discovery, scoping, technical design, implementation, rollout, and iteration.

- Balance speed and quality by making thoughtful tradeoffs, ensuring maintainability, and building with operational reliability in mind.

- Collaborate closely with cross-functional partners (operators, engineering, product) to drive adoption and measurable impact.

- Mentor other engineers and help establish strong engineering practices for an internal-tools environment.