Handshake
Tech / AI / Software
SeniorSoftwareEngineer-Pay&Safety
Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Senior candidates.
“Senior Software Engineer - Pay & Safety at Handshake. Skills: Payout and money-movement systems, Trust & Safety stack, Operator tooling, Schema design, Migrations, Backfills, System design reviews, Incident response, Runbooks, Observability. Design and build payout and money-movement systems on top of Payment Service Providers, including onboarding, KYC, country and payout-method support, web hook reconciliation, retries, and rate-limit handling, with zero-downtime rollout and full audibility fo”
What You'll Achieve.
Pay can't go down.; Ban decisions can't be silent.; Webhooks can't be lost.
Industry & Context.
You can defend why a given state is or isn't reachable.
What They're Looking For.
Must Have
5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with meaningful time spent owning production systems where correctness and uptime matter (payments, fintech, identity, fraud, infrastructure, or similar high-stakes domains), system design fundamentals for highly reliable, zero-downtime, auditable, and resilient systems: expand-contract migrations, idempotency, retries and backoff, dual-writes and backfills, append-only audit logs, and reconciliation jobs, Deep proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL), data modeling, and schema evolution under load. You can defend why a given state is or isn't reachable., backend skills in Ruby on Rails and/or TypeScript/Node, and willingness to work fluently across both., Comfort in React for operator and fellow-facing UI., Experience designing and operating asynchronous workflows (Temporal, Sidekiq, or similar) and integrating with third-party APIs that fail in interesting ways (Stripe, Deel, Hubstaff, or equivalents)., Track record of leading technical projects end-to-end in ambiguous environments, with a bias toward shipping behind feature flags and verifying in production., Excellent communication and stakeholder management. You can partner with Ops, Finance, Legal, and Compliance and translate their requirements into system invariants., Track record of mentoring engineers and raising the engineering bar on a team.
Nice to Have
Prior experience building production payments, payout, or money-movement systems, Background in Trust & Safety, fraud, KYC/AML, sanctions screening, or identity verification at scale., Experience with event sourcing, change-data-capture, or audit-log architectures where every state change is reconstructable., Experience operating comparable workflow orchestrators for long-running, idempotent business processes., Experience with regulated or compliance-driven workstreams (1099-NEC issuance, OFAC, GDPR/data deletion, SOC 2 controls).
What You'll Do.
Design and build payout and money-movement systems on top of Payment Service Providers
country and payout-method support
web hook reconciliation
and rate-limit handling
with zero-downtime rollout and full audibility for every state change.
Build out a robust and flexible payment and incentives platform that powers how fellows are compensated
and retained across every project we run.
Build the Trust & Safety stack: KYC and re-verification flows
sanctions and fraud screening
ban and suspicious-account state transitions
and time-tracking audits over activity
including the Pay admin dashboard
operations that let our ops team run pay weeks safely.
Lead end-to-end on schema design
and backfills across Postgres and design rollouts that are safe to deploy.
Set the bar for engineering practices on the squad through system design reviews
and mentor other engineers through code review and architectural guidance.
How You'll Work.
Team & Collaboration
Partner with Ops, Finance, Legal, and Compliance and translate their requirements into system invariants.; Mentor other engineers through code review and architectural guidance.
Communication Scope
Excellent communication and stakeholder management.; Can partner with Ops, Finance, Legal, and Compliance and translate their requirements into system invariants.
Process & Methodology
Lead end-to-end on schema design, migrations, and backfills across Postgres and design rollouts that are safe to deploy., Track record of leading technical projects end-to-end in ambiguous environments
Full Job Description
About Handshake Handshake is the career network for the AI economy. 20 million knowledge workers, 1,600 educational institutions, 1 million employers (including 100% of the Fortune 50), and every foundational AI lab trust Handshake to power career discovery, hiring, and upskilling, from freelance AI training gigs to first internships to full-time careers and beyond. This unique value is leading to unparalleled growth; in 2025, we tripled our ARR at scale. 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 - Work hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world’s top educational institutions - Join a team with leadership from Scale AI, Meta, xAI, Notion, Coinbase, and Palantir, among others - Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue ABOUT THE ROLE As a Senior Software Engineer on the Pay squad, you'll own the systems that move money to Handshake AI's global fellow workforce. That includes earnings calculation, payout generation, Stripe-backed disbursement, and the operator tooling that runs every our pay cycle. You'll also be helping us build out a much more sophisticated Trust & Safety surface area: KYC and identity verification, sanctions and fraud screening, and time-tracking audit systems that catch suspicious activity throughout Handshake AI. This is a role for engineers who treat reliability, audibility, and resilience as first-class design constraints. Pay can't go down. Ban decisions can't be silent. Webhooks can't be lost. You'll set the bar for how these systems are designed, deployed, and verified. Our work spans across microservices and integrations with payment and trust and safety providers. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Design and build payout and money-movement systems on top of Payment Service Providers, including onboarding, KYC, country and payout-method support, web hook reconciliation, retries, and rate-limit
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