Senior Software Engineer, Frontend Platform

About Handshake

At Handshake, our platform connects job seekers with life-changing career opportunities. Behind that mission is a frontend ecosystem that helps teams build clear, consistent, accessible, and high-quality experiences for students, employers, and education partners.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Frontend Platform Team, you'll help build and evolve that foundation. You'll work on the systems, libraries, and workflows that make it easier for product engineers to deliver great frontend experiences—faster, safely, and with less duplicated effort.

About the Role

Frontend Platform is a small, high-leverage team with a broad mandate. We own Handshake's design system and component libraries, frontend accessibility, frontend infrastructure in CI/CD, developer tooling, and cross-cutting UI concerns.

You'll treat these capabilities as products for frontend engineers, designers, and product teams. You'll help turn recurring problems into reusable solutions, establish thoughtful standards and paved paths, and create a frontend platform that scales with Handshake's products and engineering organization.

This role is a strong fit for an expert generalist: someone with deep expertise in a few areas and the breadth to move across frontend architecture, developer experience, design systems, accessibility, infrastructure, and product needs.

What You'll Do

As a Senior Software Engineer on Frontend Platform, you will:

• Build and evolve reusable TypeScript and React components, patterns, APIs, documentation, and tooling that are used across multiple Handshake applications

• Help shape the design system as a living product, balancing consistency and accessibility with the flexibility product teams need to solve customer problems.

• Improve the frontend developer experience by creating clear paved paths for local development, testing, builds, releases, and ongoing maintenance.

• Use AI tools heavily as part of your day-to-day engineering workflow: to understand code, prototype, implement, test, debug, refactor, document, and review changes, while applying sound human judgement.

• Build reusable AI-enabled frontend workflows for the rest of the organization, including agent-ready documentation and context, rules, linters, structured CI review, accessibility and visual checks that helps product teams and agents contribute safely without making our team a bottleneck.

• Strengthen frontend infrastructure in CI/CD, including build, test, lint, packaging, and other workflows that help engineers ship with confidence.

• Make accessibility a built-in capability through accessible component APIs, shared guidance, automated checks, and close partnership with product teams.

• Own or contribute to cross-cutting frontend capabilities that need to work consistently across applications and teams.

• Partner with product engineers, designers, product managers, and other platform teams to understand their needs, make durable technical decisions, and drive adoption of shared solutions.

• Lead projects from problem definition through implementation, rollout, documentation, and iteration based on feedback from platform customers.

• Raise the bar for frontend engineering through design reviews, code reviews, technical writing, mentoring, and knowledge sharing.

What We're Looking For

We're looking for someone with:

• 5+ years of professional frontend software development experience, with experience operating at a high level of scope and ownership.

• Expertise in TypseScript, React, and the modern frontend ecosystem, including strong knowledge of browser fundamentals, frontend architecture, testing, and performance tradeoffs.

• Experience building or maintaining reusable frontend libraries, design systems, component platforms, or other shared capabilities used by multiple teams or applications.

• Experience working on both product teams and platform, infrastructure, or developer-experience teams—or a demonstrated understanding of the different problem-solving approaches each requires.

• A track record of turning ambiguous, recurring problems into simple, maintainable, and well-adopted solutions.

• Experience designing APIs and abstractions that are easy for other engineers to understand, use, extend, and operate over time.

• Strong collaboration and communication skills, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs, build alignment, and work effectively with people across engineering, design, and product.

• A customer mindset for internal platform users: you seek feedback, measure whether your work helps, and optimize for self-service rather than creating unnecessary dependency on the platform team.

• Demonstrated ability to turn AI experiments into durable engineering solutions.

Nice to Have

• Experience working on a design system or component library with a strong focus on accessibility, consistency, documentation, and adoption.

• Experience withNx, Webpack or other frontend build and test infrastructure, CI/CD systems, monorepos, package publishing, or developer tooling.

• Experience with Storybook, visual regression testing, automated accessibility testing, or other approaches to maintaining shared UI quality at scale.

• Experience with frontend navigation, routing, application shells, performance, or other cross-cutting UI concerns.

• Experience establishing standards, contribution models, or governance for shared frontend code.

• Experience mentoring engineer or leading technical initiatives across team boundaries.

Perks

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

💻 Office: Commuting support, free lunch, and gym in our SF office

🏝 Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days

🤝 Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses