Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

Your impact

At Handshake, we are assembling a team of dynamic engineers who are passionate about building high-quality, impactful, self-service platforms. As a Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, you will spearhead the management of our Search Infrastructure platform and Search Data Pipeline, guaranteeing their seamless operation in a scalable cloud environment. Your expertise will be pivotal in optimizing our platforms for maximum efficiency and reliability, owning our Technical Excellence and SRE programs, ensuring they meet the demands of our growing business while maintaining robust scalability. You'll play a crucial role in mentoring and developing junior engineers, fostering a collaborative and growth-oriented team culture

Your role

• Design, implement, and maintain scalable cloud infrastructure solutions using industry best practices.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure smooth integration of infrastructure components and broader application architecture.

• Monitor, analyze, and optimize cloud infrastructure performance, reliability, and cost-effectiveness.

• Automate deployment, configuration, and management tasks using infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as Terraform and Spacelift.

• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior members of the infrastructure team.

• Participate in on-call rotations to address infrastructure-related incidents and ensure high availability of our cloud services and the Handshake Platform.

• Stay updated on emerging cloud technologies and trends, evaluating their potential impact on existing infrastructure and recommending appropriate adoption strategies.

• Design and document infrastructure configurations, procedures, and best practices to facilitate knowledge sharing and maintain operational efficiency.

• Lead our Technical Excellence program, increasing observability and measurement of KPIs & SLOs across our platforms.

• Implement modern, cloud-native solutions such as service mesh, advanced scaling and deployment strategies, workflow orchestration.

• Develop and improve processes to provide self-service and first-class user experience for our engineers.

• Be a thought leader, drive innovation by helping to develop team roadmaps aligning with our business goals.

• Work in a 100% Cloud Environment (GCP) and use tools and services like Argo Workflows, Argo CD, Datadog, Kubernetes, improving the reliability and scalability of our platforms.

Your experience

• You are adept with agile software development lifecycle and DevOps principles

• You thrive taking projects from inception to completion and are outcome-oriented, measuring business impact

• You act with empathy when partnering with fellow engineers and coworkers, focusing on user experience and simplicity

• You build and maintaining cloud-based architectures in AWS and/or GCP, at scale

• You have expertise with Kubernetes, IaC, observability and modern infrastructure tooling

• You have prior experience with building and maintaining self-service tooling and guardrails

• You have experience in securing Cloud workloads through implementing best practices such as OPA, RBAC, and utilizing Kubernetes security features

• You have experience building or working directly with SRE in areas related to Operational Readiness and Incident Response

• You have Infrastructure networking experience: firewalls, load balancing, DNS, etc.

• You are passionate about building simple, yet high-quality infrastructure

• You have experience working in distributed, performant, at-scale backend systems

• You are strong in Operations and have a passion for automation and reducing toil

Bonus areas of expertise

• GitOps & Argo ecosystem of tools

• Service Mesh (istio, Linkerd, etc.)

• ElasticSearch and search indexing, semantic and vector search experience

• Distributed tracing and observability with tools like Datadog, OTEL

• FinOps and cloud cost controls/governance

About us

Handshake is the career platform for Gen Z. With a community of over 17 million students, alumni, employers, and career educators, Handshake’s network is where career advice and discovery turn into first, second, and third jobs. Nearly 1 million companies use Handshake to build their future workforce—from Fortune 500 to federal agencies, school districts to startups, healthcare systems to small businesses. Handshake is built for where you’re going, not where you’ve been.

When it comes to our workforce strategy, we’ve thought deeply about how work-life should look at Handshake. With our hybrid-work model, employees benefit from collaboration and shared team experiences three days per week in our vibrant offices, and enjoy the flexibility of remote work two days per week (unless noted in the specific job posting). Handshake is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, London, and Berlin.

What we offer

At Handshake, we'll give you the tools to feel healthy, happy and secure.

Benefits below apply to US employees in full-time positions.

• 💰 Equity and ownership in a fast-growing company.

• 🍼 16 Weeks of paid parental leave for birth giving parents & 10 weeks of paid parental leave for non-birth giving parents.

• 💝 Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision policies including LGTBQ+ Coverage. We also provide resources for Mental Health Assistance, Employee Assistance Programs and counseling support.

• 📚 Generous learning & development opportunities and an annual $2,000 stipend for you to grow your skills and career.

• 💰 Financial coaching through Origin to help you through your financial journey.

• 🛜 Monthly internet stipend and a brand new MacBook to allow you to do your best work.

• 🚃 Monthly commuter stipend for you to expense your travel to the office (for office-based employees).

• 🥗 Free lunch provided 3x a week across all offices.

• 🤝 Referral bonus to reward you when you bring great talent to Handshake.

• 🏦 401k Match: Handshake offers a dollar-for-dollar match on 1% of deferred salary, up to a maximum of $1,200 per year.

• 🏝 All full-time US-based Handshakers are eligible for our flexible time off policy to get out and see the world. In addition, we offer 13 standardized holidays, and 2 additional days of flexible holiday time off. Lastly, we have a Winter #ShakeBreak, a one-week period of Collective Time Off.

• 💻 Handshake offers $500 home office stipend for you to spend during your first 3 months to create a productive and comfortable workspace at home.

• 🍼 Family support: Parental leave coaching and support provided by Parentaly. We partner with Maven Clinic to provide a lifetime coverage up to $15K for expenses related to fertility and family forming!

• 💰 Lifestyle Savings Account: We offer you an annual stipend of $500 to use for purchases such as fitness classes, gym memberships, work-from-home setup, and more.

Looking for more? Explore our mission, values and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.

Handshake is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or reasonable accommodation, please let your recruiter know during initial communications.