Senior People Systems Partner, Workday

Handshake was founded on a simple belief that everyone deserves a path to a great career, regardless of where they went to school or who they know. Today, we power 25 million job seekers, 1 million+ employers, and 1,600 educational institutions.

In 2025, we started Handshake AI and built the fastest-growing AI data business in history. We work directly with frontier AI lab researchers to create evaluations, publish benchmarks, and push the boundary of data. We’ve grown from $0 to ~$1B run rate and pay ~$60M to over 30K individuals every month.

Handshake is hiring a Senior People Systems Partner to be our hands-on Workday builder. You’ll own the day-to-day technical work in our tenant -- configuring business processes, building reports, running EIBs, maintaining tenant hygiene, and supporting our simpler integrations. The work is Workday-deep.

You’ll report to Handshake’s lead of People Systems, Technology & Analytics, and partner closely with our People Operations team and other partners across the company. You’ll be a key advisory input on what’s possible, feasible, how to do it, how long it will take, and the risks involved.

Handshake uses Workday for HCM, Compensation, Benefits, Time & Absence, Payroll, and Integrations. We expect this person to handle most Core HCM work and ideally bring expertise in one additional module. For projects outside those modules or for highly technical work, we retain an external Workday consulting firm on an hourly basis.

• Serve as the trusted technical advisor to the People Systems lead -- bring clear answers on feasibility, approach, LOE, and risk

• Partner closely with People Operations on day-to-day Workday work; collaborate with HRBPs, Compensation, Benefits, Talent Acquisition, Payroll, IT, and Engineering Operations

• Translate ambiguous business asks into Workday-native solutions and surface tradeoffs honestly

• Configure the BPs that codify how Handshake hires, promotes, transfers, and terminates employees -- including custom objects, validation rules, conditional routing, notifications, and delegation

• Recent examples: end-to-end attendance policy exception flow, executive supervisory org redesign, termination process redesign with regrettable / voluntary flagging

• Build, maintain, and security-tune custom reports and dashboards used by HRBPs, Compensation, Finance, and the exec team

• Translate ambiguous asks (”who’s exempt from RTO?”, ”monthly Europe-only census”) into well-scoped reports, calculated fields, and durable data models

• Lead EIB uploads and bulk operations for re-orgs, performance and compensation cycles, RIFs, and other ad-hoc mass changes

• Coordinate timing with downstream systems (Okta, Slack, Github, Datadog, Linear) so go-lives are clean; test thoroughly in Sandbox / Preview before promoting to Production

• Audit and improve tenant data: organizations, supervisory orgs, locations, cost centers, job profiles, comp grades, and reference IDs. Lead periodic tenant health checks

• Own simple integrations (e.g., Workday–Slack); partner with our external Workday consultant for more complex integration work

• 5–8+ years of hands-on Workday administration with deep Core HCM expertise, ideally with additional depth in one of: Compensation, Benefits, Time & Absence, or Payroll

• Demonstrated end-to-end ownership of business process configuration -- custom objects, validation rules, conditional routing, delegation, notifications

• Strong reporting chops: custom reports, calculated fields, and security-tuned datasets.

• Comfort running mass data operations (RIFs, perf cycles, re-orgs) with disciplined SBX-to-Prod rigor and an eye for downstream impact

• Excellent stakeholder management: take an ambiguous request from an HRBP, comp partner, or exec and return a clean spec, build, and rollout plan

• Comfort working independently in a small, high-trust People team where priorities shift

• Workday Pro certification(s) in HCM, Compensation, Benefits, Absence, Payroll, Reporting, or Integrations

• Working knowledge of US (and ideally global) HR compliance considerations: pay transparency, CA emergency contact requirements, visa tracking, EOR / EMEA, and RIF / WARN

• Experience supporting global workforce changes -- RIFs, EOR conversions, country open / close, sabbaticals

• Familiarity with Workday Customer Central administration and tenant security models