Everyone is welcome at Handshake. We know diverse teams build better products and we are committed to creating an inclusive culture built on a foundation of respect for all individuals. We strongly encourage candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, historically marginalized or underrepresented groups to apply.

Your impact

At Handshake, we are building a team of engineers dedicated to creating impactful, high-quality products. As a Staff Data Architect, you will drive the architectural vision, strategic direction, and evolution of our advanced data platform. Your leadership and expertise will directly influence how millions of students discover meaningful career opportunities, breaking down barriers related to education, network, and resources.

Our core objective is to build robust pathways on top of our base data platform that enables cross-functional teams to create data-driven features while ensuring accurate, timely, and secure data access across the organization. Your role will be central to realizing this vision by establishing resilient, scalable data architecture pathways that guide the company in making data-informed decisions.

Your role

• Technical Leadership and Strategy: Leading the data engineering function at an architectural level. Defining best practices and setting long-term vision for the data ecosystem. You will mentor, guide, and collaborate with the data and product engineering teams, helping to elevate their technical capabilities while fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
• Data Architecture and Solution Design: Architecting scalable, reliable, and efficient data pipelines, services, and products that meet diverse business needs. Building on the foundations we have built, and leveraging deep knowledge of emerging technologies, you’ll make strategic recommendations and implement systems aligned with industry best practices to ensure the scalability, security, and resilience of our data platform.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Partnering with product managers, engineering leads, and other stakeholders to define data architecture requirements that align with business goals. You will ensure data solutions are well-integrated into the broader technology landscape and drive the development of innovative, data-driven features.
• Performance and Optimization: Leading efforts to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, ensuring data processing systems are highly optimized for both performance and cost-effectiveness.
• Data Quality, Governance, and Compliance: Establishing and implementing data governance frameworks to ensure data reliability, security, and regulatory compliance. You will lead initiatives to monitor, enforce, and enhance data quality across the platform, and help build out a strategy that solves data access across all facets of our organization

Your experience

• Deep Data Engineering and Architecture Expertise: Extensive experience in architecting and implementing complex, large-scale data platforms, including data warehousing solutions and scalable data services. Mastery of data engineering tools, technologies, and best practices, with a demonstrated ability to design end-to-end data ecosystems.
• Cloud Platform Proficiency: Significant hands-on experience with cloud-based data technologies, preferably within Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including BigQuery, DataFlow, BigTable, and related tools.
• Strategic Problem-solving Skills: Strong analytical abilities and a track record of tackling complex data challenges with innovative, strategic solutions that enhance the efficiency, reliability, and scalability of data platforms.
• Influential Collaboration: An ability to engage and influence both technical and non-technical stakeholders through clear communication and a team-oriented approach, ensuring alignment across departments.

Bonus areas of expertise

• Advanced Technologies: Proficiency with Go programming language, dbt for data transformations, containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Data Analytics Solutions: Designing and implementing analytic solutions for both internal and external customers of the data platform, working across departments to drive large initiatives forward
• Machine Learning Collaboration: Experience with machine learning teams, interfacing and facilitating infrastructure and pipelines to accelerate our ML efforts

Compensation range

$235,000-$290,000

For cash compensation, we set standard ranges for all