Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, Handshake AI

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 1600 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. Weve grown from $0 to $1B run rate and pay $60M to over 30K individuals every month.

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

• Partner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs Fortune 500 partners and the worlds top educational institutions

• Work together with engineers scientists operators and more from Palantir Meta Scale AI and former YC founders

• Build a massive fast-growing business with billions in revenue

About Handshake AI

Human data is the core infrastructure to AI advancement. Frontier AI labs currently improve model capabilities with various data-intensive post-training techniques. We believe that data spend for AI training will increase by 3-5x in the next few years and continue for much longer as models take on new domains. Handshake AI supports all of the frontier AI labs working on their most complex data at the largest scale.

As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer youll serve as a technical leader at the intersection of our engineering organization and our most strategic customers including leading AI labs. Youll own the end-to-end lifecycle of high-impact deploymentsfrom scoping complex technical requirements to architecting building and scaling solutions that directly improve customer workflows and model performance. Youll operate across the stack in highly ambiguous fast-changing environments and your judgment will shape how we approach our most critical partnerships.

This is a unique opportunity to combine deep technical leadership with direct customer engagementdriving not just the what and the how but setting the standard for how Handshake delivers at the highest level.

Location: San Francisco CA 5 days/week in-office

• Partner with AI labs and cross-functional stakeholders to deeply understand technical challenges translate ambiguous requirements into actionable engineering plans and drive alignment across teams.

• Own the design architecture and delivery of tailored production-grade solutions for complex high-impact customer needsoften with minimal precedent or existing playbooks.

• Mentor and uplevel other engineers through code reviews architectural guidance and establishing best practices for forward-deployed work.

• Make key architectural decisions around reliability scalability and security and set the technical direction for repeatable deployment patterns.

• Rapidly prototype test and iterate on tools in response to real-time feedback balancing speed of delivery with long-term maintainability.

• Create and maintain technical playbooks documentation and frameworks that enable the team to scale deployments efficiently.

• 5 years of professional software engineering experience with meaningful time spent in customer-facing solutions-oriented or forward-deployed roles.

• Strong proficiency with ReactJS and TypeScript with a high bar for code quality usability and accessibility.

• Deep understanding of relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL) data modeling and system design.

• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS GCP) deployment pipelines and production operations at scale.

• Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects end-to-end in ambiguous environments with shifting requirements.

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills with the ability to build trust with both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Track record of mentoring engineers and raising the bar on engineering practices within a team.

• Experience architecting and delivering production systems for LLMs or other AI-powered products in real-world customer-facing environments.

• Background in building or contributing to component libraries design systems or reusable deployment frameworks.

• Proven experience with performance optimization and scaling of full-stack applications under real-world constraints and high-traffic conditions.

• Prior experience in a forward-deployed solutions engineering or technical consulting role at a high-growth company.

Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supportedand 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 $500 wellness stipend

Growth: $2000 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 Experience:

Senior IC