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 the Role
As a Senior Cloud Engineer, you'll be at the center of how we design, deploy, and evolve our cloud infrastructure. You'll work closely with engineering, platform, and security teams to define patterns that scale — and make it genuinely easy for developers to do the right thing. You'll codify best practices, champion automation, and bring a modern, opinionated perspective on how cloud-native infrastructure should work.
This isn't a "keep the lights on" role. You'll be architecting systems, writing the playbooks others follow, and pushing us toward a more intelligent, automated infrastructure future.
What You'll Do
- Architect and manage scalable, reliable cloud infrastructure across our production and development environments
- Define and enforce best practices for cloud deployments, making it easy for teams to ship safely and confidently
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines (we use Buildkite) and GitOps workflows with ArgoCD to streamline how code gets from commit to production
- Own and evolve our Infrastructure as Code practices using Terraform, Crossplane, or similar IaC tooling
- Drive platform improvements that reduce toil and increase developer velocity
- Explore and implement AI-driven approaches to infrastructure automation, observability, and incident response
- Partner with engineering teams to design systems that are cloud-native from the ground up
- Mentor engineers across the organization on cloud best practices and patterns
Desired Capabilities
- Deep hands-on experience with GCP (strongly preferred), AWS, or Azure — you've run production workloads at scale and know where the bodies are buried
- Strong proficiency with Infrastructure as Code, particularly Terraform or experience with Crossplane or similar policy-driven IaC
- Fluency with modern CI/CD tooling — Buildkite, GitHub Actions, or similar — and a strong GitOps mindset with tools like ArgoCD or Flux
- Experience designing container-based and Kubernetes-native architectures
- A genuine curiosity about applying AI and automation to infrastructure problems — whether that's smarter alerting, self-healing systems, or LLM-assisted runbooks
- Strong communication skills — you can explain a complex architectural decision to an engineer and an executive alike
- A collaborative spirit and a bias toward documentation, standards, and shared ownership
Extra Credit
- Familiarity with FinOps practices and cloud cost optimization
- Background in platform engineering or developer experience (DX)
- Exposure to Cloud Security practices, and experience with IAM, SIEM, scanning, etc.
- Experience with service mesh architectures (Istio, Linkerd)
Perks
Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supported—and thrive at work and in life.
The below benefits are for full-time US employees.
🎯 Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company
💰 Financial Wellness: 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coaching
🍼 Family Support: Paid parental leave, fertility benefits, parental coaching
💝 Wellbeing: Medical, dental, and vision, mental health support, wellness stipend
📚 Growth: Learning stipend, ongoing development
💻 Remote & Office: Internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF office
🏝 Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days
🤝 Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses
Explore our mission, values, and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.