Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

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 1600 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. Weve 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 worlds 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.

Were 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 youll own the end-to-end lifecycle of customer deploymentsfrom understanding technical requirements to architecting building and scaling production systems that improve customer workflows and model performance. Youll 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 worlds leading AI labs.

Location: Bengaluru India. This is an in-office role.

• Partner directly with frontier AI labs to understand complex technical challenges and translate them into scalable engineering solutions

• Partner closely with Engineering Research Product and Operations teams in the US to execute against a shared roadmap

• Design build and deploy production-grade applications that solve high-impact customer problems

• Own technical architecture for customer deployments with a focus on reliability scalability security and maintainability

• Rapidly prototype test and iterate on solutions based on customer feedback

• Build reusable tools frameworks and deployment patterns that improve delivery across customer engagements

• Mentor engineers through technical leadership code reviews and engineering best practices

• Help establish a strong engineering culture as we continue building our India engineering organization

• 6 years of professional software engineering experience

• Experience leading technically complex customer-facing solutions engineering or forward deployed engineering projects

• Strong proficiency with TypeScript React and modern backend architectures

• Deep understanding of relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL) system design distributed systems and cloud infrastructure

• Experience building and operating production systems on AWS or GCP

• Strong technical judgment and the ability to solve complex engineering problems in fast-moving ambiguous environments

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills

• Experience collaborating effectively with globally distributed engineering teams including teams based in the US

• 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.

Perks:

• Generous Equity Grant vested over 4 years

• Housing Bonus: 1.3 Lakhs spread throughout the first year

• Well Defined Performance Bonus ranging between 10 - 100% of base

• Medical Insurance Coverage

• Food credit for every in person day.

Required Experience:

Senior IC