HR, Manager - 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 0to~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 are building our India team to help accelerate the development of frontier models. This team is a critical, strategic investment for us - we have grown the team 3x in the past six months to help fuel our next phase of growth. India-based teammates will work hand-in-hand with US-based teams to scope, execute, and deliver critical human data projects to Frontier Labs and other customers.

About the Role

Handshake AI's Bangalore team is growing fast, and we need an HR Manager who can be the reliable first point of contact for our India-based employees - someone equally comfortable answering a benefits question, keeping us compliant with local labor law, and flexing up to help resolve a sensitive employee relations issue or support light workforce planning. This is a hands-on role with real range: mostly foundational HR work, done well, with room to stretch into higher-judgment partnering as you build.

• Own front-line employee relations and HR compliance for our Bangalore team, resolving day-to-day policy, leave, and benefits questions accurately and on the same day

• Independently triage and resolve routine employee complaints and workplace concerns, escalating complex cases to HRBP leadership with clear context and a recommended path

• Maintain HR policies, documentation, and statutory compliance (POSH, PF, ESI, Shops & Establishments Act, gratuity, etc.) that keep Handshake AI audit-ready as the India team scales

• Partner closely with recruiting on onboarding, offer logistics, and new-hire compliance, and collaborate cross-functionally with our US-based People team on shared processes and projects

• Support light workforce and team planning - tracking headcount, leave, and org changes - so managers and HRBPs have accurate, up-to-date data to plan against

• Manage the complete employee lifecycle, from onboarding through offboarding, ensuring smooth transitions, compliance, and a positive employee experience at every stage.

• 4-6 years of experience in an HR Manager, HR Generalist, or Associate HRBP role, ideally at a fast-growing tech or startup company

• Working knowledge of Indian labor law and statutory compliance requirements (POSH, PF, ESI, Shops & Establishments Act, gratuity)

• A track record of resolving employee questions and routine ER issues independently, with good judgment on what to escalate and when

• Strong stakeholder management and partnership skills - comfortable building trust with employees, managers, recruiting, and a US-based People team

• Comfort handling sensitive employee situations with discretion, empathy, and professionalism

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate policy into plain, practical language

• Experience with HRIS, payroll/EOR, or ticketing tools (e.g., Deel, Workday, Freshservice) to manage employee inquiries at scale

• High attention to detail and comfort operating with some ambiguity in a fast-moving environment

• Genuine excitement about Handshake's mission and the AI economy

• Experience working cross-functionally with a US-based team, including comfort with some overlap hours

• Exposure to contractor, gig, or data-annotation workforce models

• Familiarity partnering with Employers of Record (EOR) like Deel or Rippling

• Prior experience flexing between generalist HR execution and higher-judgment HRBP-style partnering