Senior Manager, Operational Excellence & Strategy
Company: Handshake
Location: San Francisco, CA
Salary: $160k - $200k per year
Type: Full-time
Level: mid
Posted: 2026-03-10
About this role
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
We are building the operational engine required to scale the Fellow Experience organization as we expand to serve hundreds of thousands of Fellows across dozens of AI projects and frontier lab customers. We are seeking a Senior Manager of Operational Excellence and Strategy to architect the systems, models, enablement frameworks, and performance infrastructure that enable consistent execution and predictable scale across multiple teams.
You will design the operating model for a large, people-intensive function at the intersection of AI project delivery, workforce experience, and customer impact. The environment is high volume, high complexity, highly cross-functional, and constantly evolving. This includes ensuring that new processes, tools, and standards are clearly documented, adopted, and embedded across teams.
This role is ideal for a former consultant or strategy operator who is eager to move from advising to building. You will move beyond analysis to implement the systems and structures that power a global team operating across several geog...