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Handshake is hiring a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to set technical direction for the Network and Handshake AI Marketplace Relevance team. You will architect and own the roadmap for ML systems powering core embedding models, job search & recommendations, user understanding, and personalized notifications across the platform.
In this role, you'll operate as a force multiplier—defining technical strategy for systems spanning search, recommendation, notifications, generative retrieval, and core embeddings. You'll own a suite of systems built on multiple retrieval models including Graph Neural Networks, bi-encoders, semantic cross-encoders with multi-stage rankers, running on a data platform with billions of data points. Your work directly impacts the marketplace's core metrics and positions you as a key voice in how Handshake approaches explainability, fairness, and quality at scale.
Key responsibilities include: architecting technical strategy and system design for ML models and infrastructure with company-wide impact; setting technical standards and best practices for model development, experimentation, and production deployment; mentoring and elevating engineers and data scientists across the team; partnering with engineering leadership, product, and data science to translate business problems into clear technical roadmaps; and getting hands-on building and shipping high-leverage models and systems.
You'll need 8+ years in machine learning, data science, or related field with a track record of owning large-scale production ML systems end-to-end. Deep expertise required in Python and ML frameworks (scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow), plus experience in recommendations, personalization, NLP, deep learning, LLMs, or explainable AI. You should have deep familiarity with the ML lifecycle at scale, demonstrated ability to architect and scale ML infrastructure in high-traffic cloud environments, and experience setting technical direction across teams and mentoring senior engineers. Experience with Generative Retrieval and LLM Post Training is a plus.
Handshake was founded on the belief that everyone deserves a path to a great career. The company powers 25 million job seekers, 1 million+ employers, and 1,600 educational institutions. In 2025, Handshake launched Handshake AI, a rapidly growing AI data business now at ~$1B run rate, working directly with frontier AI labs to create evaluations and push the boundary of data.
