Handshake - Marketing Platform & Web Properties

I joined Handshake in October 2023 to support development on their Next.js + Sanity CMS marketing site. Within a few months, I became the subject matter expert on the platform and my scope expanded well beyond the original brief. Today I lead a team of 5 contract developers and own frontend engineering across 6+ Handshake web properties.

I work embedded with the marketing team, collaborating daily with designers, marketers, content editors, and researchers.

The main marketing site runs on Next.js with Sanity CMS and Tailwind CSS. I build new pages, campaigns, and features while maintaining a content architecture that lets non-technical team members publish and configure pages independently.

Key builds on the core site include:

Resource Center — a full content hub with collection pages, Algolia-powered search, and faceted filtering. The homepage is configurable through Sanity, so the marketing team can rearrange featured content without touching code. This is serious engineering work: Next.js + Sanity + Algolia working together to serve hundreds of articles, reports, videos, and e-books across multiple collections. Facets are generated through Sanity, and the search functionality is custom-built on Algolia.

Research Hub — an editorial microsite with two categories (AI Research and Economic Research), author pages, and blog-style articles. Built to support Handshake's growing body of labor market research.

Enterprise Product Page — a high-stakes sales page featuring video hero, animated stats, an embedded interactive product tour (Navattic), case study carousels, and G2 badge integrations. This page drives enterprise sales conversations.

OpenAI x Handshake Codex Creator Challenge — a campaign landing page for a partnership with OpenAI, featuring sponsor logos from Geico, Uber, JPMorgan, Salesforce, and L'Oréal. Animated sections, FAQ accordion, and multiple conversion CTAs.

Handshake's AI Fellowship pages (joinhandshake.com/ai) run on Framer, while the rest of the site runs on Next.js. I engineered the cross-origin routing using Next.js rewrites to make both platforms coexist seamlessly under one domain.

I also built a staging workaround for Framer's lack of branching. Since Framer has no concept of draft vs. published states for individual pages, any page under review by designers could accidentally go live. My solution: I prefix staging page URLs with "staging-" and wrote rules that prevent those paths from rendering on the production domain. Simple, reliable, and it saved the team from accidental publishes.

I built ai-support.joinhandshake.com from scratch as a standalone Next.js application integrated with Zendesk. This isn't a Zendesk theme — it's a custom frontend that pulls content from Zendesk's API and presents it under Handshake's brand. The site covers onboarding, project participation, payments, and policies for the Handshake AI Fellowship program.

My day-to-day spans new page builds, campaign launches, CMS architecture decisions, cross-platform routing, and third-party integrations. I translate Figma designs into production code, collaborate with researchers on data-driven content, and make architectural calls that affect how the entire marketing org publishes content.

I lead a team of 5 contract developers, coordinating workstreams across multiple properties and ensuring consistency in code quality and delivery speed.