Senior Cloud Engineer

About Handshake AI

Handshake is building the career network for the AI economy. Our three-sided marketplace connects 18 million students and alumni, 1,500+ academic institutions across the U.S. and Europe, and 1 million employers to power how the next generation explores careers, builds skills, and gets hired.

Handshake AI is a human data labeling business that leverages the scale of the largest early career network. We work directly with the world’s leading AI research labs to build a new generation of human data products. From PhDs in physics to undergrads fluent in LLMs, Handshake AI is the trusted partner for domain-specific data and evaluation at scale.

This is a unique opportunity to join a fast-growing team shaping the future of AI through better data, better tools, and better systems—for experts, by experts.

Now’s a great time to join Handshake. Here’s why:

• Leading the AI Career Revolution: Be part of the team redefining work in the AI economy for millions worldwide.

• Proven Market Demand: Deep employer partnerships across Fortune 500s and the world’s leading AI research labs.

• World-Class Team: Leadership from Scale AI, Meta, xAI, Notion, Coinbase, and Palantir, just to name a few.

• Capitalized & Scaling: $3.5B valuation from top investors including Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures, Notable Capital, and more.

About the Role

As a Senior Cloud Engineer, you'll be at the center of how we design, deploy, and evolve our cloud infrastructure. You'll work closely with engineering, platform, and security teams to define patterns that scale — and make it genuinely easy for developers to do the right thing. You'll codify best practices, champion automation, and bring a modern, opinionated perspective on how cloud-native infrastructure should work.

This isn't a "keep the lights on" role. You'll be architecting systems, writing the playbooks others follow, and pushing us toward a more intelligent, automated infrastructure future.

What You'll Do

• Architect and manage scalable, reliable cloud infrastructure across our production and development environments

• Define and enforce best practices for cloud deployments, making it easy for teams to ship safely and confidently

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines (we use Buildkite) and GitOps workflows with ArgoCD to streamline how code gets from commit to production

• Own and evolve our Infrastructure as Code practices using Terraform, Crossplane, or similar IaC tooling

• Drive platform improvements that reduce toil and increase developer velocity

• Explore and implement AI-driven approaches to infrastructure automation, observability, and incident response

• Partner with engineering teams to design systems that are cloud-native from the ground up

• Mentor engineers across the organization on cloud best practices and patterns

Desired Capabilities

• Deep hands-on experience with GCP (strongly preferred), AWS, or Azure — you've run production workloads at scale and know where the bodies are buried

• Strong proficiency with Infrastructure as Code, particularly Terraform or experience with Crossplane or similar policy-driven IaC

• Fluency with modern CI/CD tooling — Buildkite, GitHub Actions, or similar — and a strong GitOps mindset with tools like ArgoCD or Flux

• Experience designing container-based and Kubernetes-native architectures

• A genuine curiosity about applying AI and automation to infrastructure problems — whether that's smarter alerting, self-healing systems, or LLM-assisted runbooks

• Strong communication skills — you can explain a complex architectural decision to an engineer and an executive alike

• A collaborative spirit and a bias toward documentation, standards, and shared ownership

Extra Credit

• Familiarity with FinOps practices and cloud cost optimization

• Background in platform engineering or developer experience (DX)

• Exposure to Cloud Security practices, and experience with IAM, SIEM, scanning, etc.

• Experience with service mesh architectures (Istio, Linkerd)

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, wellness stipend

📚 Growth: 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.