Staff Software Engineer, Consumer Experience at Handshake

Department: Engineering

Compensation

$265,000 – $295,000/yr

Location: San Francisco, California
Type: Full-time
Level: staff+
Posted: Mar 20, 2026

Description

Handshake is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for its Consumer Experience team to build and scale consumer-facing products connecting students with employers. The role leads distributed-system architecture, influences technical direction, mentors engineers, and champions engineering best practices. It requires 8+ years of software engineering experience, staff-level ownership, distributed-system expertise, proficiency in Go, Python, or JavaScript, cloud-platform knowledge, and strong communication skills. The position offers equity, medical, dental, and vision benefits, and is available to full-time US employees.

Required Skills

Distributed systems
Go
Python
JavaScript
Cloud platforms
Communication

Additional Information

Required Previous Experiences: 8+ years of software engineering experience owning and delivering large-scale, complex systems
Staff-level experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams
Experience mentoring senior engineers and elevating engineering culture
Preferred Qualifications: Experience building and scaling distributed systems in consumer or social products
Background in search, recommendations, ranking systems, or personalization at scale
Experience with user identity knowledge graphs, entity resolution, and real-time inference
Experience building AI-powered systems, including LLM-based applications
Prior experience in high-growth or rapidly scaling environments