Senior Software Engineer

About the Company

Handshake was founded on a simple belief that everyone deserves a path to a great career. In 2025, we started Handshake AI, building the fastest-growing AI data business in history to support frontier AI labs with complex data at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design and build payout and money-movement systems on top of Payment Service Providers, including onboarding, KYC, and webhook reconciliation.
• Build a robust payment and incentives platform to power fellow compensation and retention.
• Develop the Trust & Safety stack, including KYC flows, sanctions screening, and fraud detection.
• Own operator tooling, including the Pay admin dashboard and ledger.
• Lead end-to-end schema design, migrations, and backfills across Postgres.
• Set engineering standards through system design reviews, incident response, and mentorship.

Requirements

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience in high-stakes domains like fintech, payments, or identity.
• Strong system design fundamentals (idempotency, retries, audit logs, and reconciliation).
• Deep proficiency with PostgreSQL and relational data modeling.
• Strong backend skills in Ruby on Rails and/or TypeScript/Node.
• Proficiency in React for building operator and fellow-facing UIs.
• Experience with asynchronous workflows (Temporal, Sidekiq) and third-party API integrations.
• Proven track record of leading technical projects and mentoring engineers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience building production money-movement or payout systems.
• Background in Trust & Safety, fraud, KYC/AML, or identity verification.
• Experience with event sourcing or change-data-capture architectures.
• Experience with regulated workstreams such as SOC 2, GDPR, or OFAC.