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

Handshake is hiring a Director of Engineering for our Developer Platform team. In this role, you will oversee multiple teams building common Handshake services and tools that power the development of the core features for our students, employers, and EDU partners.  You will be responsible for helping the engineering organization achieve better productivity, velocity, and efficiency through the creation of tools, reusable services, design systems, and APIs that can help us continue improving the quality of our codebase and systems so we can continue democratizing, even more, the opportunity for early talent.

You will have opportunities to:

• Work on many complex technical backend, frontend, and mobile challenges ultimately working toward our vision of democratizing opportunity for students.
• Grow and scale a rapidly growing diverse team by hiring top talent.
• Build a fast-growing team by defining its culture, processes, and operating model, while heavily influencing the broader Engineering environment and overall Handshake architecture.
• Participate and drive business strategy and planning for your entire organization
• Help shape the future of the Handshake R&D organization

Your role

• Leading, coaching, and inspiring your engineering leaders and their teams of engineers.
• Manage a 22+ person engineering team and rapidly grow the organization at least twofold in the coming year.  
• Guiding the technical direction of Handshake’s architecture for our existing products, and new products we are developing.
• Advocate for architectural enhancements and refactoring initiatives that will ensure the continued scale and growth of Handshake’s products.
• Partner closely with key Product, Design, and Engineering leaders across Handshake to enable the success of Handshake’s product development teams.
• Represent the Developer Platform Engineering team’s needs at the Engineering leadership level while helping to role out processes and programs across all of Engineering as we scale. 
• Fostering team growth by ensuring the right processes are in place, facilitating efficient communication, and hiring the right talent to fill in the gaps.
• Collaborating across the organization by proactively providing visibility into your teams' work, including celebrating successes, learning from failures, and managing expectations.
• Leading with empathy as you help us nurture a culture of growth, inclusion, and belonging
• Help guide the engineering organization to achieve business outcomes
• Ability to demonstrate and track progress on business outcomes with effective definition and execution of a roadmap for all the teams in your organization

Your experience

• Experience managing other managers.
• Proven track record of being able to lead multi-team Engineering organizations by leading through and influencing the leaders that report to you.
• Understanding of how to build impactful, diverse teams.
• Background in software engineering and experience leading teams at the platform service layer.
• Ability to understand the team’s overall technical challenges and architecture while quickly being able to understand technical details when diving deeper into problems.
• Ability to effectively gather requirements from Product and Engineering teams to inform roadmaps, while keeping internal stakeholders informed of changes and updates being made at the platform services layer.
• Excellent people management skills, focusing on supporting empowerment.
• Ability to provide strategic product direction to the Platform Services team while evolving the organization as it rapidly grows.
• Passion for helping teams and individuals grow, and for building an inclusive culture and diverse team.

Compensation range

• $260,000 - $290,000/year

Want to learn more about what it's like to work at Handshake? Check out these interviews from our team members!

For cash compensation, we set standard ranges for all U.S.-based roles based on function, level, and geographic location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. In order to be compliant with local legislation, as well as to provide greater transparency to candidates, w