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 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.
In this role, you will:
- 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
Desired Capabilities
- 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
Extra Credit
- 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
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**.