Senior People Systems Partner, Workday

About Handshake

Handshake is the career network for the AI economy. 20 million knowledge workers, 1,600 educational institutions, 1 million employers (including 100% of the Fortune 50), and every foundational AI lab trust Handshake to power career discovery, hiring, and upskilling, from freelance AI training gigs to first internships to full-time careers and beyond. This unique value is leading to unparalleled growth; in 2025, we tripled our ARR at scale.

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

• Work hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world’s top educational institutions

• Join a team with leadership from Scale AI, Meta, xAI, Notion, Coinbase, and Palantir, among others

• Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue

The Role

Handshake is hiring a Senior People Systems Partner to be our hands-on Workday builder. You’ll own the day-to-day technical work in our tenant -- configuring business processes, building reports, running EIBs, maintaining tenant hygiene, and supporting our simpler integrations. The work is Workday-deep.

You’ll report to Handshake’s lead of People Systems, Technology & Analytics, and partner closely with our People Operations team and other partners across the company. You’ll be a key advisory input on what’s possible, feasible, how to do it, how long it will take, and the risks involved.

Handshake uses Workday for HCM, Compensation, Benefits, Time & Absence, Payroll, and Integrations. We expect this person to handle most Core HCM work and ideally bring expertise in one additional module. For projects outside those modules or for highly technical work, we retain an external Workday consulting firm on an hourly basis.

Partner across the People team and the company

• Serve as the trusted technical advisor to the People Systems lead -- bring clear answers on feasibility, approach, LOE, and risk

• Partner closely with People Operations on day-to-day Workday work; collaborate with HRBPs, Compensation, Benefits, Talent Acquisition, Payroll, IT, and Engineering Operations

• Translate ambiguous business asks into Workday-native solutions and surface tradeoffs honestly

Build and maintain business processes

• Configure the BPs that codify how Handshake hires, promotes, transfers, and terminates employees -- including custom objects, validation rules, conditional routing, notifications, and delegation

• Recent examples: end-to-end attendance policy exception flow, executive supervisory org redesign, termination process redesign with regrettable / voluntary flagging

Build reports and analytics

• Build, maintain, and security-tune custom reports and dashboards used by HRBPs, Compensation, Finance, and the exec team

• Translate ambiguous asks (”who’s exempt from RTO?”, ”monthly Europe-only census”) into well-scoped reports, calculated fields, and durable data models

Run mass data operations and re-orgs

• Lead EIB uploads and bulk operations for re-orgs, performance and compensation cycles, RIFs, and other ad-hoc mass changes

• Coordinate timing with downstream systems (Okta, Slack, Github, Datadog, Linear) so go-lives are clean; test thoroughly in Sandbox / Preview before promoting to Production

Maintain tenant hygiene and simple integrations

• Audit and improve tenant data: organizations, supervisory orgs, locations, cost centers, job profiles, comp grades, and reference IDs. Lead periodic tenant health checks

• Own simple integrations (e.g., Workday–Slack); partner with our external Workday consultant for more complex integration work

You Have

• 5–8+ years of hands-on Workday administration with deep Core HCM expertise, ideally with additional depth in one of: Compensation, Benefits, Time & Absence, or Payroll

• Demonstrated end-to-end ownership of business process configuration -- custom objects, validation rules, conditional routing, delegation, notifications

• Strong reporting chops: custom reports, calculated fields, and security-tuned datasets.

• Comfort running mass data operations (RIFs, perf cycles, re-orgs) with disciplined SBX-to-Prod rigor and an eye for downstream impact

• Excellent stakeholder management: take an ambiguous request from an HRBP, comp partner, or exec and return a clean spec, build, and rollout plan

• Comfort working independently in a small, high-trust People team where priorities shift