Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

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 We're 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, you'll own the end-to-end lifecycle of customer deployments—from understanding technical requirements to architecting, building, and scaling production systems that improve customer workflows and model performance. You'll 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 world's leading AI labs. Location: Bengaluru, India. This is an in-office role. What You'll Do 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 What We're Looking For 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 Nice to Have Experience bu