Your Impact

Handshake is hiring a Senior Engineering Manager reporting into our Co-Founder, Ben Christensen, to help us deliver a world-class consumer experience. More than half of college students in the US have a profile on Handshake, but they’re using the platform primarily as a transactional job board. In this role, you will work with a cross-functional team (including product, design, marketing, machine learning engineers, and many others) to deliver a roadmap that helps students grow their careers through content and community and transforms Handshake into Gen Z’s professional social network. Ultimately, we believe Handshake can give every student access to the career-defining power of a supportive community, and we need your help to make that happen. You will lead, grow, and support the engineers building our customer-facing products. You will work on complex technical challenges and enable millions of students and job-seekers to connect with employers through Handshake’s platform.

You Will Have Opportunities To

• Create a direct impact in the world by helping Handshake to democratize the opportunity for our millions of students
• Work in an impressive, innovative environment with many growth and career development opportunities.
• Grow and scale a team, hiring top talent focusing on DEI
• Help to define our culture and processes, not only as a team but also as an organization

Your Role

• Build, lead, and successfully develop a team of software engineers from all levels; defining their career development plans, setting specific goals, and motivating them to achieve results as part of their growth.
• Foster and develop strong consumer habits in the ways we build, creating high-quality products through iterative approaches, along with building strong hypotheses and experimentation
• Partner closely with key stakeholders across Handshake, including Design, Product Management, Machine Learning/Relevance and strategic business partners to define clear, ambitious, attainable, metric-oriented goals for their team
• Guide technical decisions and provide technical coaching, helping tech leads to define and prioritize engineering roadmap
• Lead with empathy as you help us nurture a culture of growth, inclusion, and belonging

Your Experience

• Build, lead, and develop successfully a team of software engineers from all levels (from junior to senior), defining their career development plans, setting specific goals, and motivating them to achieve results as part of their growth
• Works cross-functionally to define, drive, and track product-level success
• 4+ years experience managing a technical team, 5+ years in technical leadership roles, 8+ years in software engineering
• Experience managing multiple teams and managing managers
• Demonstrated experience working with or across other engineering teams to ship features or technical improvements
• Experience working as an, and managing, Full-Stack engineer(s), with either web or mobile clients
• Experience working with any or all of: Ruby/Rails, Go, Python, Javascript/React, and Swift/SwiftUI
• Experience working with any or all of: ElasticSearch, Redis, PostgresQL, SideKiq, and GCP Pub/Sub, DataFlow, and Spanner
• Experience working closely with Data teams, including Machine Learning and relevance

Compensation Range

$200,000 - $275,000/year

About Us

Handshake is the career platform for Gen Z. With a community of over 17 million students, alumni, employers, and career educators, Handshake’s network is where career advice and discovery turn into first, second, and third jobs. Nearly 1 million companies use Handshake to build their future workforce—from Fortune 500 to federal agencies, school districts to startups, healthcare systems to small businesses. Handshake is built for where you’re going, not where you’ve been. When it comes to our workforce strategy, we’ve thought deeply about how work-life should look at Handshake. With our hybrid-work model, employees benefit from collaboration and shared team experiences three days per week in our vibrant offices, and enjoy the flexibility of remote work two days per week (unless noted in the specific job posting). Handshake is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, London, and Berlin.

What We Offer

At Handshake, we'll give you the tools to feel healthy, happy and secure.

Benefits Below Apply To Employees In Full-time Positions

• 💰 Equity and ownership in a fast-growing company.
• 🍼 16 Weeks of paid parental leave for birth giving parents & 10 weeks of paid parental leave for non-birth giving parents.
• 💝 Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision policies including LGTBQ+ Coverage. We also provide resources for Mental Health Assistance, Employee Assistance Programs and counseling support.
• 💻 Handshake offers $500/£360 home office stipend for you to spend during your first 3 months to create a productive and comfortable workspace at home.
• 📚 Generous learning & development opportunities and an annual $2,000/£1,500/€1,850 stipend for you to grow your skills and career.
• 💰 Financial coaching through Origin to help you through your financial journey.
• 🛜 Monthly internet stipend and a brand new MacBook to allow you to do your best work.
• 🚃 Monthly commuter stipend for you to expense your travel to the office (for office-based employees).
• 🥗 Free lunch provided 3x a week across all offices.
• 🤝 Referral bonus to reward you when you bring great talent to Handshake.

US-specific Benefits, In Addition To The First Section

• 🏦 401k Match: Handshake offers a dollar-for-dollar match on 1% of deferred salary, up to a maximum of $1,200 per year.
• 🏝 All full-time US-based Handshakers are eligible for our flexible time off policy to get out and see the world. In addition, we offer 13 standardized holidays, and 2 additional days of flexible holiday time off. Lastly, we have a Winter #ShakeBreak, a one-week period of Collective Time Off.
• 🍼 Family support: Parental leave coaching and support provided by Parentaly. We partner with Maven Clinic to provide a lifetime coverage up to $15K for expenses related to fertility and family forming!
• 💰 Lifestyle Savings Account: We offer you an annual stipend of $500 to use for purchases such as fitness classes, gym memberships, work-from-home setup, and more.

UK-specific Benefits, In Addition To The First Section

• 🏦 Pension Scheme: Handshake will provide you with a workplace pension, where you will make contributions based on 5% of your salary. Handshake will pay the equivalent of 3% towards your pension plan, subject to qualifying earnings limits.
• 🏝 Up to 25 days of vacation to encourage people to reset, recharge, and refresh, in addition to 8 bank holidays throughout the year.
• 🤝 Regular offsites each year to bring the team together + opportunity to travel to our HQ in San Francisco.
• 🛍️ Discounts across various high street retailers, cinemas and other social activities exclusively for Handshake UK employees.

Germany-specific Benefits, In Addition To The First Section

• 🏝 25 days of annual leave + 5 days of a winter #ShakeBreak, a one-week period of Collective Time Off across the company.
• 🤝 Regular offsites each year to bring the team together + opportunity to travel to our HQ in San Francisco once a year.
• 🧘 Urban sports club membership offering access to a diverse network of fitness and wellness facilities.
• 🛍️ Discounts across various high street retailers, cinemas and other social activities exclusively for Handshake Germany employees.