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 the Role
Handshake is the career network for millions of students and early-career professionals, and our iOS app is how many of them find their first job. Nearly one million students use the app every week to discover jobs, connect with employers, and attend career events.
You'd be joining a small iOS team of four senior engineers as our first Engineer I, which means two things. First, ownership: on a team this size, you won't be handed tickets off someone else's backlog. You'll take features from concept to App Store launch on surfaces real students depend on. Second, mentorship: every engineer around you is senior, and investing in your growth is part of why this role exists. You'll have a named onboarding mentor, deep code review, and four experienced engineers whose job includes making you better. We're hiring at this level because we want to grow you: the path to Engineer II is something we'll be building toward together from day one.
We ship on a weekly release train to a mature, well-guarded codebase with modular architecture, a shared design system, and strong testing and CI, so you get the rare combination of moving fast and learning what good looks like. If you used Handshake to land your own first job, you already know what this app means to students. This role is your chance to build it for the ones coming up behind you.
What You'll Do
- Own features end to end, from product and design conversations through building, testing, launch, and iterating on real usage data, as part of a squad
- Build in Swift and SwiftUI (with UIKit where it lives today) inside an MVVM + Coordinator architecture: you'll write view models, wire up GraphQL/REST services, and ship UI on our internal design system
- Ship every week: feature flags, staged rollouts, and thorough code review from senior engineers on every PR
- Work on high-visibility consumer surfaces like jobs discovery, career events and fairs, and student profiles, including the seasonal back-to-school moments when usage peaks
- Help build AI-powered experiences in the app, and use AI tools daily in how you work; this team treats AI-assisted engineering as table stakes
- Write unit tests for your view models, contribute to acceptance test coverage, and care about the quality of what you ship
Desired Capabilities
- 2+ years of professional iOS software engineering experience building and shipping production mobile applications.
- You've shipped real iOS software to real users. A live App Store app is the gold standard, but production features shipped during an internship or job, a substantial public iOS project, or a TestFlight app with actual users all count. Roughly 1–3 years of building iOS apps, professionally or independently.
- You own your code. You can walk through something you built and explain why you structured it that way, where it breaks, and what you'd redo. We use AI tools every day and expect you to, and we expect you to fully understand every line you ship. Shipped is not the same as understood.
- You know your way around modern iOS fundamentals: Swift, view models and MVVM (or similar patterns), networking, and asynchronous code.
- You take initiative. You've started something yourself, iterated on user feedback, or pushed a project further than anyone asked you to. You ask questions early and run with answers.
- You communicate clearly in PRs, in design discussions, and when you're stuck.
Extra Credit
- Consumer app experience: you've built for end users at scale rather than internal or B2B tools
- Experience with both SwiftUI and UIKit, and moving between them
- Familiarity with GraphQL, unit/UI testing (XCTest or similar), or CI/CD tooling like Fastlane
- A personal app currently live in the App Store
- Experience using analytics, experimentation (A/B testing), or user feedback to decide what to build next
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, wellness stipend
📚 Growth: Learning stipend, ongoing development
💻 Remote & Office: Internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF office
🏝 Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days
🤝 Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses
Explore our mission, values, and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.