Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

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

We're hiring a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to work directly with frontier AI labs to solve their most complex engineering challenges.

As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll own the end-to-end lifecycle of customer deployments—from understanding technical requirements to architecting, building, and scaling production systems that improve customer workflows and model performance. You'll operate across the stack, partnering closely with Engineering, Research, Product, and Operations teams in both India and the US to deliver solutions for our most strategic customers.

This is a unique opportunity to combine deep software engineering with customer partnership, helping shape how Handshake AI delivers solutions to the world's leading AI labs.

Location: Bengaluru, India. This is an in-office role.

What You'll Do

• Partner directly with frontier AI labs to understand complex technical challenges and translate them into scalable engineering solutions

• Partner closely with Engineering, Research, Product, and Operations teams in the US to execute against a shared roadmap

• Design, build, and deploy production-grade applications that solve high-impact customer problems

• Own technical architecture for customer deployments with a focus on reliability, scalability, security, and maintainability

• Rapidly prototype, test, and iterate on solutions based on customer feedback

• Build reusable tools, frameworks, and deployment patterns that improve delivery across customer engagements

• Mentor engineers through technical leadership, code reviews, and engineering best practices

• Help establish a strong engineering culture as we continue building our India engineering organization

What We're Looking For

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience

• Experience leading technically complex customer-facing, solutions engineering, or forward deployed engineering projects

• Strong proficiency with TypeScript, React, and modern backend architectures

• Deep understanding of relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL), system design, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure

• Experience building and operating production systems on AWS or GCP

• Strong technical judgment and the ability to solve complex engineering problems in fast-moving, ambiguous environments

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills

• Experience collaborating effectively with globally distributed engineering teams, including teams based in the US

Nice to Have

• Experience building AI-powered products, LLM infrastructure, or machine learning platforms

• Experience working directly with enterprise customers or strategic technical partners

• Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines

• Experience supporting applied AI or ML research teams

• Experience working in a fast-growing startup or high-growth engineering organization

What Success Looks Like

• Customer deployments launch successfully and deliver measurable value

• Technical solutions become reusable across multiple customer engagements

• Deployments are reliable, scalable, and easy to maintain

• Customer feedback directly informs platform improvements and future product capabilities

• You become a trusted technical partner across customers and engineering teams in both India and the US

You’ll Thrive Here If You:

• Are motivated by solving operational problems that have direct, measurable impact.

• Want to be part of a company shaping the future of AI through human data.

• Can navigate ambiguity, act with urgency, and keep multiple workstreams moving in parallel.

Perks:

• Generous Equity Grant vested over 4 years

• Housing Bonus: 1.3 Lakhs spread throughout the first year

• Well Defined Performance Bonus ranging between 10 - 100% of base

• Medical Insurance Coverage

• Food credit for every in person day.