Machine Learning Engineer I

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

Handshake is hiring a Machine Learning Engineer I for the Network & Core Relevance team. The recommender systems playbook that dominated the last decade is being rewritten, and we're hiring the engineers who will lead that rewrite.

We're rebuilding our core discovery engine around generative recommendation architectures: unified retrieval and ranking under shared transformer backbones, semantic item tokenization, graph-aware representation learning, and preference-aligned training objectives. This is the most significant architectural shift in recommender systems in a generation, and it's happening in production.

In this role, you'll take end-to-end ownership of ML models and features that determine how students and employers find each other. You'll work on hard problems — behavioral signal sparsity in a search domain, cold-start at institutional scale, multi-objective optimization across a three-sided marketplace — and you'll be expected to take big swings on them.

Your Role

• Owner: Take end-to-end ownership of ML models and features — from problem framing and experimentation through deployment and production monitoring — with growing autonomy over time.

• Innovator: Develop and iterate on machine learning models that improve core relevance and network-driven signals, including graph-based and embedding-based approaches.

• Collaborator: Partner closely with senior engineers, data scientists, and product managers to design experiments, interpret results, and translate findings into product impact.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related technical field.

• 1–3 years of industry or research experience in machine learning or a related area.

• Proficiency in Python and hands-on experience with ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.

• Solid understanding of core ML concepts: ranking, classification, regression, model evaluation, and validation.

• Familiarity with software engineering best practices including version control, testing, and code reviews.

• Experience with SQL and data analysis techniques.

Preferred Qualifications

• MS or PhD degree in a relevant field.

• Experience in applied ML in domains such as recommendations, personalization, search, NLP, or graph-based learning.

• Familiarity with generative recommendation approaches — including semantic item tokenization (RQ-VAE, residual quantization), unified retrieval-ranking architectures, or sequential recommendation models — even if through research or coursework rather than production.

• Exposure to preference-aligned training objectives (RLHF, DPO, reward modeling) and interest in applying them to multi-objective recommendation settings.

• Hands-on experience with Graph Neural Networks or graph-based representation learning for user or item modeling.

• Familiarity with dense retrieval, two-tower architectures, or embedding-based candidate generation at scale.

• Experience with ML lifecycle management including experiment tracking, feature engineering pipelines, and production monitoring.

• Experience with cloud infrastructure such as GCP, AWS, or Azure in the context of ML workflows.

• Publications or contributions at venues such as SIGIR, KDD, WSDM, RecSys, NeurIPS, or ICML — particularly in retrieval, ranking, or generative modeling.

• Strong communication skills with the ability to present technical work clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

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, $500 wellness stipend

📚 Growth: $2,000 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.