Forward Deployed Engineer I, Handshake AI

About the role

ABOUT HANDSHAKE

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.

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 world’s 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.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll work at the intersection of our engineering organization and our most strategic customers, including leading AI labs. You'll contribute to the full lifecycle of high-impact deployments—helping scope technical requirements, building and iterating on solutions that directly improve customer workflows and model performance. You'll operate across the stack in ambiguous, fast-changing environments, working closely with senior engineers to shape how we approach our most critical partnerships.

This is a unique opportunity to combine hands-on technical work with direct customer engagement—learning how to deliver at the highest level while growing your skills in a forward-deployed environment.

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

- Partner with AI labs and cross-functional stakeholders to understand technical challenges, help translate requirements into actionable engineering plans, and contribute to alignment across teams.

- Build and iterate on tailored, production-grade solutions for complex customer needs, often with guidance from senior engineers and minimal existing playbooks.

- Participate actively in code reviews and contribute to best practices for forward-deployed work.

- Contribute to architectural discussions around reliability, scalability, and security, and help implement repeatable deployment patterns.

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

- Help create and maintain technical documentation and frameworks that enable the team to scale deployments efficiently.

Desired Capabilities

- 1-4 years of professional software engineering experience, ideally including some exposure to customer-facing, solutions-oriented, or forward-deployed work.

- Strong proficiency with ReactJS and TypeScript, with a solid bar for code quality, usability, and accessibility.

- Good understanding of relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL), data modeling, and system design fundamentals.

- Some experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP), deployment pipelines, and production operations.

- Demonstrated ability to contribute to technical projects in ambiguous environments with shifting requirements.

- Strong communication skills, with the ability to build trust with both technical and non-technical audiences.

- Eagerness to learn from and collaborate with senior engineers, with growing interest in raising the bar on engineering practices.

Extra Credit

- Exposure to architecting or delivering systems for LLMs or other AI-powered products in customer-facing environments.

- Experience contributing to component libraries, design systems, or reusable frameworks.

- Some experience with performance optimization of full-stack applications.

- Interest in or early experience with forward-deployed, solutions engineering, technical consulting, or customer facing work.

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, $500 wellness stipend

📚 Growth: $2,000 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 http://joinhandshake.com/careers.