Director, Platform Services
We are thrilled to announce Handshake’s $200M Series F funding round. At Handshake, we believe that a career opportunity shouldn’t be determined by who you know or what you’ve done. It’s about what you can - and will - do. Your future, not your past. Our Series F fundraise and new valuation of $3.5B will fuel our next phase of growth and propel our mission to help more people start, restart, and jumpstart their careers.
Handshake is the #1 place to launch a career with no connections, experience, or luck required. Handshake’s community includes 20 million students and young alumni around the world from 1,400 educational institutions, including four-year colleges, community colleges, boot camps, and 290+ minority-serving institutions. The platform connects up-and-coming talent with 650,000+ employers - from Fortune 500 companies like Google, Nike, and Target to thousands of public school districts, healthcare systems, nonprofits, and even sports teams like the LA Dodgers. Handshake is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Denver, New York, and London and teammates working globally.
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.
If you are not sure that you’re 100% qualified, but up for the challenge – we want you to apply. We believe skills are transferable and passion for our mission goes a long way.
Your Impact:
Handshake is hiring a Director of Platform Services on the Engineering Team. In this role, you will oversee multiple teams building common Handshake services that power the core features for our students, employers, and EDU partners. You will be responsible for enabling our architecture to scale and enhance our core products' reliability, scalability, and availability for customers
You will also have opportunities to:
Work on complex technical backend 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.
Your Role:
Leading, coaching, and inspiring your Engineering Managers and their teams of Engineers and TPMs.
Manage a 10+ person engineering team and rapidly growing 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 Platform Services 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
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:
$227,578 - 260,090
Benefits below apply to employees in full-time positions.
- Stock: Ownership in a fast-growing company.
- 401k: We care about your ability to save for your future.
- Hub-based Remote Work: Handshakers can enjoy the flexibility of remote work, whilst ensuring collaboration and team experiences in a shared space remains possible.
- Time Off: Flexible vacation policy to encourage people to get out and see the world.
- Healthcare: World-class medical, dental, and vision policies including LGTBQ+ Coverage.
- Family Focus: Parental leave and flexibility for families.
- Mental Health Assistance: You’ve got a lot on your mind, which can lead to less attention on your mental health. We’re here to help and support you every step of the way.
- Financial Management with Origin: We provide you with a professional financial planner via so that you can gain a better understanding of making the most of your compensation, equity, benefits, 401k and perks.
- Goodies: Whatever hardware and software you need to get the job done.
- Team Fun: Regularly scheduled virtual events, happy hours, and book clubs! Once it’s safe, we’ll provide meaningful connection points throughout the year for Handshakers to build community and meet teammates in-person.
- Learning: Learning & Development opportunities and an annual $2,000 stipend for you to grow your skills and career.
- Great team: Working with fun, hardworking, nice people who are committed to making a difference!
- ...And much more! Explore our comprehensive benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.
Interested in what Handshake’s San Francisco HQ is like when we’re together? Check out this video: Just browsing or not ready to apply? Keep in touch with us!