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 As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll work at the intersection of our engineering organization and our most strategic customers, including leading AI labs. You'll contribute to the full lifecycle of high-impact deployments—helping scope technical
requirements, building and iterating on solutions that directly improve customer workflows and model performance. You'll operate across the stack in ambiguous, fast-changing environments, working closely with senior engineers to shape how we approach our most critical partnerships. This is a unique opportunity to combine hands-on technical work with direct customer engagement—learning how to deliver at the highest level while growing your skills in a forward-deployed environment. Location: San Francisco, CA | 5 days/week in-office Partner with AI labs and cross-functional stakeholders to understand technical challenges, help translate