Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, India

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.

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.

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.

• 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

• 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

• 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.