Senior Software Engineer - Pay & Safety

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 1,600 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. We’ve 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 world’s 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 Handshake AI Human data is the core infrastructure to AI advancement. Frontier AI labs currently improve model capabilities with various data-intensive post-training techniques. We believe that data spend for AI training will increase by 3-5x in the next few years and continue for much longer as models take on new domains. Handshake AI supports all of the frontier AI labs, [... source excerpt omitted ...] y to Handshake AI's global fellow workforce. That includes earnings calculation, payout generation, Stripe-backed disbursement, and the operator tooling that runs every pay cycle. You'll also be helping us build out a much more sophisticated Trust & Safety surface area: KYC and identity verification, sanctions and fraud screening, and time-tracking audit systems that catch suspicious activity throughout Handshake AI. This is a role for engineers who treat reliability, auditability, and resilience as first-class design constraints. Pay can't go down. Ban decisions can't be silent. Webhooks can't be lost. You'll set the bar for how these systems are designed, deployed, and verif [... source excerpt omitted ...] ther engineers through code review and architectural guidance. What We’re Looking For 6+ 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