Forward Deployed Engineer
Handshake
Forward Deployed Engineer
Handshake
Connects talent with jobs and AI training work
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.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Handshake AI Enterprise, you'll embed directly inside enterprise customer environments as part of a small, expert team. You'll learn each customer's business deeply — their workflows, their bottlenecks, where the real leverage is — and translate that understanding into production-grade AI agents that measurably change how they operate.
This isn't an implementation or consulting role. You'll own the full stack: defining the solution, building and deploying agents, designing evals, and iterating until performance actually moves. Over time, you'll become a genuine domain expert in your customer's vertical — and use that expertise to build AI that keeps getting better.
If you've built AI that works in the real world and want to do it again at much higher stakes — with better data, closer lab relationships, and a founding team that moves fast — this is the role.
Embed directly with enterprise customers as part of a small deployment team, developing deep understanding of their business and workflows
Define AI-driven solutions based on real business needs — not theoretical use cases
Build and deploy production-grade agents tailored to specific customer use cases, owning end-to-end delivery
Design and run evals to measure agent performance; iterate and hill-climb until results move
Become a domain expert in your customer's vertical and use that expertise to build better AI over time
Work closely with Product and Platform engineers on your team to ship cohesive, reliable solutions
Establish engineering best practices, agent patterns, and reusable frameworks that help the forward-deployed team scale output without sacrificing quality
Surface insights from deployments that inform Handshake's platform and product roadmap
Location: San Francisco, CA | 5 days / week in-office
1-4+ years of engineering experience, full-stack with strong backend depth
Real-world experience building and shipping AI applications in production — not just fine-tuning or prototyping
Strong understanding of agent architectures, evals, and how to measure and systematically improve AI performance
Comfort working directly with enterprise customers in ambiguous, high-stakes environments
Strong systems thinking — you can zoom out to the business problem and zoom in to the technical solution without losing either thread
High ownership mentality — you care about outcomes, not just outputs
Strong communication skills — you'll be in the room with senior stakeholders regularly and need to earn their trust quickly
Background at a company with a forward deployment or field engineering model
Experience building multi-agent systems in production
Domain expertise in a specific enterprise vertical (recruiting, finance, ops, legal, etc.)
Familiarity with enterprise security requirements, VPC deployments, or on-prem configurations
History of building evals infrastructure or AI quality measurement tooling
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.
Handshake connects job seekers, employers, and university career centers through recruiting software, and supplies AI labs with experts who train and test language models. Its career platform combines job matching, recruiting events, and profiles that show completed AI projects and paid training experience. Handshake AI recruits and matches fellows to projects where they review model answers, create training data, and apply knowledge from their own fields. Employers pay for recruiting subscriptions and promotions, while its enterprise AI team builds agents and trains models inside customers' systems. Handshake was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in San Francisco.
Explore more opportunities at Handshake