Senior Data Engineer

Handshake • Full-time • San Francisco, CA, US • 5h ago

About Handshake

Handshake is building the career network for the AI economy, backed by the largest and most trusted job network on the internet. As the only three-sided job marketplace connecting 18 million knowledge workers, 1,500 educational institutions, and 1 million employers, Handshake powers career discovery, hiring, and upskilling—from first internships to full-time roles, freelance work to gig work, and beyond.

Founded in 2014, we’ve built the most trusted platform for early talent—owning the college-to-career market and powering nearly every career center. Today we’re building on that foundation to help students and early professionals upskill or reskill for the future.

Now’s a great time to join Handshake. Here’s why:

Category Leader: Over 92% coverage across US universities & 77% of total US university student population.
Proven Market Demand: Deep employer partnerships across Fortune 500s and the world’s leading AI research labs.
World-Class Team: Leadership from Scale AI, Open AI, xAI, Notion, Coinbase, and Palantir, just to name a few.
Capitalized & Scaling: $434M raised with a $175M+ run rate.

Your impact

At Handshake, we are assembling a team of dynamic engineers who are passionate about creating high-quality, impactful products. As a Senior Data Engineer, you will play a key role in driving the architecture, implementation, and evolution of our cutting-edge data platform. Your technical expertise will be instrumental in helping millions of students discover meaningful careers, irrespective of their educational background, network, or financial resources.

Our primary focus is on building a robust data platform that empowers all teams to develop data-driven features while ensuring that every facet of the business has access to the right data for making informed conclusions. While this individual will work closely in collaboration with our ML teams, they will also be supporting our businesses data needs as a whole.

About The Role

Technical leadership: Taking ownership of the data engineering function and providing technical guidance to the data engineering team. Mentoring junior data engineers, fostering a culture of learning, and promoting best practices in data engineering.
Collaborating with cross-functional teams: Working closely with product managers, product engineers, and other stakeholders to define data requirements, design data solutions, and deliver high-quality, data-driven features.
Data architecture and design: Designing and implementing scalable and robust data products that enable self-serve analytics for internal and external use. Staying abreast of emerging technologies and tools in the data engineering space, evaluating their potential impact on the data platform, and making strategic recommendations.
Performance optimization: Identifying performance bottlenecks in data processes and implementing solutions to enhance data processing efficiency.
Data quality and governance: Ensuring data integrity, reliability, and security through the implementation of data governance policies and data quality monitoring.
Advancing our Generative AI strategy: Leveraging your Data Engineering knowledge to design and implement data pipelines that support our AI Initiatives for both internal development and product features, advising and working in collaboration with our ML teams.

Desired Capabilities

Extensive data engineering experience: A proven track record in designing and implementing large-scale, complex data pipelines, data warehousing solutions, and data products. Deep knowledge of data engineering technologies, tools, and frameworks.
Software engineering excellence: Experience implementing software engineering best practices in build services for data consumption, ensuring reliability, maintainability, and scalability of data delivery systems.
Cloud platform proficiency: Hands-on experience with cloud-based data technologies, preferably Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including BigQuery, DataFlow, BigTable, and more
Problem-solving abilities: Exceptional problem-solving skills, with the ability to tackle complex data engineering challenges and propose innovative solutions.
Collaborative mindset: A collaborative and team-oriented approach to work, with the ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Extra Credit

Machine learning for data enrichment: Experience in applying machine learning techniques to data engineering tasks for data enrichment and augmentation.
End to end data service deployment, comfortable with product alignment of data-driven initiatives
Containerization and orchestration: Familiarity with containerization technologies like Docker and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
dbt: Experience with dbt as a data transformation tool for orchestrating and organizing data pipelines.

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, $500 wellness stipend
📚 Growth: $2,000 learning stipend, ongoing development
💻 Remote & Office: Stipends for home office setup, internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF office
🏝 Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days, winter #ShakeBreak where our whole office closes for a week!
🤝 Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses

Explore our mission, values, and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.

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