Manager, Engineering

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

Location: San Francisco, CA — 5 days/week in-office

About the Role

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a high-impact engineering team within Handshake Careers. You’ll own the engineering of a new, agent-first product for industry recruiting: the future of how companies find, evaluate, and reach experienced talent.

Recruiting teams work through hours of manual searching, filtering, and outreach. Our product replaces that with an agent. A recruiter describes who they need, or uploads a job description, and the agent builds an ideal candidate profile, finds matches, refines results from feedback, and drafts and sends personalized outreach.

You’ll lead the founding team, a mix of senior, staff, principal, and mid-level engineers. The product is self-serve from day one, starting free and growing into paid and enterprise tiers.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

- Lead and grow a new engineering team, including senior, staff, and principal engineers, through hiring, coaching, and career development

- Own the end-to-end product: sign-up and onboarding, agent-driven search and calibration, shortlists, analytics, and tiering

- Shape the architecture early. Review technical designs and proposals and set direction

- Drive execution on an ambitious timeline across a large project, and make clear trade-offs with product and design on scope versus speed

- Partner closely with product and design, and with the teams behind outreach, candidate data, and AI/ML search and retrieval

- Establish the team’s engineering culture, processes, and operating rhythm from the ground up

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

- 3+ years experience managing engineering teams, including teams that include senior and staff engineers

- Strong people management: high EQ, empathy, and a record of growing engineers’ careers