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 Handshake AI works directly with frontier labs to source the proprietary, real-world data that trains the next generation of AI models. Public and synthetic data are no longer enough; the next gains in model capability depend on data that reflects how organizations actually operate, and that data lives inside companies. We're hiring a Data Partnership Specialist to source it. Reporting directly to the Head of Data Development, you will identify, pitch, negotiate, and close data partnerships with companies and institutions. You'll sit between two demanding audiences: frontier lab researchers who define what data is valuable, and enterprise leaders who control access to it. Your job is to translate between them and turn that translation into signed, recurring, compliant partnerships. This is a senior, high-ownership role. You will run deals end to end and be measured on clear KPIs. Success means closing complex, multi-stakeholder partnerships and setting a high standard for how Handshake AI sources data. Own the full lifecycle of enterprise data partnerships: source targets, pitch executives, structure terms, and close agreements that supply proprietary real-world data to AI labs. Translate frontier lab data