Job Summary:
Handshake is the career network for the AI economy, connecting knowledge workers with employers and educational institutions. The Senior Software Engineer will be responsible for developing and maintaining systems that manage financial transactions and ensure safety protocols, including earnings calculation and identity verification.
Responsibilities:
• Design and build payout and money-movement systems on top of Payment Service Providers, including onboarding, KYC, country and payout-method support, webhook reconciliation, retries, and rate-limit handling, with zero-downtime rollout and full auditability for every state change.
• Build out a robust and flexible payment and incentives platform that powers how fellows are compensated, rewarded, and retained across every project we run.
• Build the Trust & Safety stack: KYC and re-verification flows, sanctions and fraud screening, ban and suspicious-account state transitions, and time-tracking audits over activity, time confirmations, and pay rates.
• Own operator tooling, including the Pay admin dashboard, ledger, and operations that let our ops team run pay weeks safely.
• Lead end-to-end on schema design, migrations, and backfills across Postgres and design rollouts that are safe to deploy.
• Set the bar for engineering practices on the squad through system design reviews, incident response, runbooks, and observability, and mentor other engineers through code review and architectural guidance.
Qualifications:
Required:
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with meaningful time spent owning production systems where correctness and uptime matter (payments, fintech, identity, fraud, infrastructure, or similar high-stakes domains).
• Strong system design fundamentals for highly reliable, zero-downtime, auditable, and resilient systems: expand-contract migrations, idempotency, retries and backoff, dual-writes and backfills, append-only audit logs, and reconciliation jobs.
• Deep proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL), data modeling, and schema evolution under load. You can defend why a given state is or isn't reachable.
• Strong backend skills in Ruby on Rails and/or TypeScript/Node, and willingness to work fluently across both.
• Comfort in React for operator and fellow-facing UI.
• Experience designing and operating asynchronous workflows (Temporal, Sidekiq, or similar) and integrating with third-party APIs that fail in interesting ways (Stripe, Deel, Hubstaff, or equivalents).
• Track record of leading technical projects end-to-end in ambiguous environments, with a bias toward shipping behind feature flags and verifying in production.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management. You can partner with Ops, Finance, Legal, and Compliance and translate their requirements into system invariants.
• Track record of mentoring engineers and raising the engineering bar on a team.
Preferred:
• Prior experience building production payments, payout, or money-movement systems.
• Background in Trust & Safety, fraud, KYC/AML, sanctions screening, or identity verification at scale.
• Experience with event sourcing, change-data-capture, or audit-log architectures where every state change is reconstructable.
• Experience operating comparable workflow orchestrators for long-running, idempotent business processes.
• Experience with regulated or compliance-driven workstreams (1099-NEC issuance, OFAC, GDPR/data deletion, SOC 2 controls).
Company:
Handshake is a college career network that helps students and recent graduates find their next opportunity. Founded in 2014, the company is headquartered in San Francisco, USA, with a team of 501-1000 employees. The company is currently Late Stage.