Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform

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 1600 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. Weve 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 worlds 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

Handshake is hiring a Senior Data Platform Engineer to build and operate the infrastructure that moves data reliably across our career marketplace and AI products. On the Data and ML Platform team you will own the systems that orchestrate batch workloads and deliver timely trustworthy data to engineers analysts and product teams.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role with the opportunity to shape Handshakes data infrastructure strategy. You will set the technical direction for our workflow orchestration platform (Airflow) data ingestion data pipelines our data warehouse (BigQuery) and streaming data infrastructure. Youll collaborate closely with ML engineers data scientists and other engineers to maximize velocity on our data platform. This infrastructure will also support Handshakes growing AI development from model and agent workflows to evaluation and production data access.

What youll do

• Lead the technical direction and roadmap for our Airflow and Astronomer platform while owning its production operations: deployment DAG packaging scheduler and worker capacity upgrades observability and incident response.

• Build paved paths for authoring testing deploying and operating workflows including reusable operators CI checks local and staging environments and clear runbooks.

• Design and operate streaming and change data capture pipelines using tools such as Pub/Sub Dataflow or Beam and Datastream to serve analytics and product use cases.

• Make data delivery resilient to retries duplicates schema changes late events backfills and replay; define useful latency freshness and reliability targets.

• Improve the cloud foundation behind data workloads with Kubernetes Terraform IAM secrets CI/CD and cost-aware capacity management.

• Lead cross-team design decisions on data contracts interfaces and operational ownership; mentor engineers and align application analytics ML and cloud partners on scalable platform approaches.

• Participate in on-call troubleshoot production failures across systems and turn incidents into durable improvements.

• Build dependable data and orchestration foundations for AI workloads including batch inference evaluation datasets and agent-facing data.

Desired Capabilities

• Strong software engineering skills in Python and experience building and operating production data or distributed systems.

• Deep hands-on Airflow experience beyond writing DAGs: scheduling and execution behavior deployment scaling upgrades monitoring and debugging failures.

• Experience with event-driven or streaming data infrastructure including a message broker or managed event bus and a stream processing system.

• Sound understanding of CDC delivery guarantees idempotency ordering schema evolution and recovery or replay in production pipelines.

• Experience with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure as code; comfortable working with containers Kubernetes CI/CD access controls and production observability.

• A track record of leading ambiguous infrastructure initiatives: setting technical direction making pragmatic architecture tradeoffs and driving adoption across teams.

• Clear communication and a track record of partnering across teams while owning systems through production support.

Extra Credit

• GCP services such as Pub/Sub Dataflow Datastream BigQuery GKE and Cloud Storage.

• Astronomer Apache Beam Terraform Spacelift Datadog dbt Spark or Dataproc.

• Supporting both batch and low-latency consumers including product-facing data services or ML features.

• Experience supporting ML or AI workloads such as inference pipelines reproducible evaluations or governed data access.

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 & vision mental health support $500 wellness stipend

Growth: $2000 learning stipend ongoing development

Remote & Office: Internet commuting & 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 & comprehensive US benefits at Experience:

Senior IC