Software Engineer I, Quality

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 Software Engineer to join our Quality team. The team builds the systems that define select and enforce quality standards across the data and evaluations we deliver to leading AI labs.

Youll work on infrastructure that evaluates complex outputs submitted by fellows such as coding tasks designed to challenge advanced AI models. These quality checks run throughout the production process: providing real-time feedback to fellows supporting internal operators and validating outputs before they reach customers.

Location: San Francisco CA. This is an in-office role five days per week.

• Build and scale backend systems that evaluate and improve the quality of data delivered to frontier AI labs

• Develop infrastructure for running quality checks in real time and before final customer delivery

• Help design recommendation systems that select the most effective quality checks for each project

• Build data pipelines and measurement systems that make complex subjective quality signals more observable and actionable

• Develop APIs and platform capabilities that allow other teams and tools to use the Quality platform

• Help surface Quality capabilities through MCP and other AI-native interfaces used by internal operators

• Partner with engineers researchers product teams and operations stakeholders to turn ambiguous quality problems into scalable technical solutions

• Improve the reliability efficiency and cost-effectiveness of quality workflows as the business grows

• 2 years of experience building and maintaining backend applications services or data-intensive systems

• Strong software engineering fundamentals including system design testing debugging and operational reliability

• A data-oriented approach to solving problems and measuring whether a system is working

• Experience working with APIs databases data pipelines or distributed systems

• The ability to navigate ambiguous problems break them into manageable pieces and deliver iteratively

• Strong communication and collaboration skills across technical and non-technical teams

• A quality-focused mindset and an interest in building systems that make difficult-to-measure outcomes more rigorous

• Experience with machine learning applied AI or AI-enabled products

• Familiarity with model evaluation experimentation recommendation systems or ranking systems

• Experience with annotation data-labeling tasking or workflow-orchestration platforms

• Experience building developer platforms internal tools or extensible APIs

• Familiarity with MCP agentic systems or AI-native development tools

• Experience working in a fast-moving startup or similarly ambiguous environment

Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supportedand thrive at work and in life.

The below benefits are for full-time US employees.

Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company

Financial Wellness: 401(k) match competitive compensation financial coaching

Family Support: Paid parental leave fertility benefits parental coaching

Wellbeing: Medical dental and vision mental health support wellness stipend

Growth: Learning stipend ongoing development

Remote & Office: Internet commuting and free lunch/gym in our SF office

Time Off: Flexible PTO 15 holidays 2 flex days

Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses

Explore our mission values and comprehensive US benefits at Experience:

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