Handshake
Enterprise · Student career platform + new AI training data line
- HQ
- San Francisco, US
- Founded
- 2014
- Website
- joinhandshake.com
Currently tracking 23 active AI roles, down 48% versus the prior 4 weeks. Primary focus: Agent · Engineering.
Handshake currently has 68 active AI-related job listings. The majority of these roles, 60%, are focused on data, with a further 15% in agents. Research and Engineering are the most frequent functions hiring for these positions. Recent hiring activity shows a significant increase, with 23 new AI roles posted in the last 30 days, representing a 92% rise compared to the preceding 30-day period.
Enterprise · Student career platform + new AI training data line
Handshake currently has 65 active AI-related roles in our index. The most common open titles are: Music Producer - AI Trainer (2), Strategic Projects Lead, Coding (2), 3D Slicer Specialist - AI Trainer , AI Red Teamer, LLM Generalist, Analog Engineer - AI Trainer. Most positions are in Engineering and Research.
Handshake's active AI hiring is concentrated in: data (66%), agents (15%), application (8%). These categories follow a seven-stage AI lifecycle: data, pre-training, post-training, serving infrastructure, agents, evaluation, and application.
Handshake is hiring AI talent in: United States (22 roles), India (4 roles).
Job postings at Handshake most frequently reference: evals, synthetic data, model serving, agent orchestration, llm observability.
In the past 30 days, Handshake has posted 10 new AI-related roles. That is a -57% change versus the prior 30 days (23 → 10).
| Title | Stage | AI score |
|---|---|---|
| AI Red Teamer, CBRNE This role focuses on evaluating AI models for safety and security, specifically concerning CBRNE threats. The Red Teamer will design adversarial prompts, assess model outputs for dangerous knowledge gaps, and document findings to help labs improve model defenses before they reach the real world. This requires deep domain expertise in CBRNE fields, strong ethical judgment, and the ability to think like a threat actor within a structured evaluation framework. | Eval Gate | 9 |
| AI Red Teamer, LLM Generalist The AI Red Teamer, LLM Generalist role focuses on stress-testing large language models by designing creative, adversarial prompts to expose vulnerabilities in AI safety, guardrails, and robustness. This involves probing models across various risk categories (content safety, CBRN, cybersecurity, etc.) and potentially across different modalities (text, image, voice, agentic). The role requires strong prompt crafting skills, ethical judgment, and collaboration with engineers and researchers to share findings and strengthen defenses. It is a generalist role that may involve working with sensitive content. | Eval GateAgent | 9 |
| Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, Handshake AI Enterprise Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to embed within enterprise customer environments, define AI-driven solutions, build and deploy production-grade AI agents, and design/run evals to measure performance. The role requires full-stack ownership, deep understanding of customer business, and iteration until performance improves. Emphasis on real-world AI application shipping and systematic improvement of AI performance. | AgentEval Gate | 9 |
| AI PhD Student Researcher - Fall 2026 Handshake AI is seeking a PhD Student Researcher to work on novel RLHF/GRPO pipelines, instruction-following refinements, reasoning-trace supervision, multilingual/long-horizon/domain-specific benchmarks, automatic vs. human preference studies, robustness diagnostics, active-learning loops, data value estimation, synthetic data generation, and low-resource fine-tuning strategies. The goal is to produce an archive-ready manuscript or top-tier conference submission. | Post-trainEval Gate | 9 |
| Engineering Manager, RLE This role is for a Senior Software Engineer to build and scale a Reinforcement Learning Environments (RLE) platform. This platform simulates real-world workflows for AI models to learn, generating data for training and evaluation. The engineer will drive architecture, build plug-and-play domains, and ensure system reliability and quality, working closely with research, product, and operations teams. Strong applied AI experience is required. | DataEval Gate | 8 |
| Manager Strategic Projects India Manager for a team of Strategic Project Leads (SPLs) focused on AI data and evaluation projects. The role involves leading delivery, quality, and scalability, managing a team, translating needs into project plans, owning performance metrics, and partnering with Product and Engineering. The role operates in a high-pressure, fast-changing environment with a focus on operational excellence and continuous improvement in AI data pipelines and labeling workflows. | DataEval Gate | 8 |
| AI Red Teamer, Cybersecurity This role focuses on evaluating AI models, specifically LLMs, for cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The AI Red Teamer will craft adversarial prompts and multi-turn interactions to test if models can be manipulated into generating functional malware, exploit code, or attack tooling. The core responsibility is to assess the output's real-world exploitability and contribute to improving model safety guardrails. This involves deep cybersecurity expertise and understanding attacker methodologies. | Eval GateAgent | 8 |
| Senior Product Manager, RL Environments — Handshake AI Senior Product Manager to own the product surface that turns RL environment creation from a bespoke, weeks-long lift into a repeatable factory. This role will design and ship the platform that compresses lead time, replaces hand-built workflows with self-serve tooling, and lets a small team of operators turn out high-quality environments for any vertical. | DataEval Gate | 8 |
| Applied AI Engineer, Handshake AI Enterprise Applied AI Engineer role focused on building and deploying production-grade AI agents within enterprise customer environments. The role involves understanding customer business needs, developing agents, running evaluations, and iterating on performance to drive measurable business impact. Requires backend engineering depth and experience with AI/ML systems in production. | Agent | 8 |
| Senior Applied AI Engineer, Handshake AI Enterprise Senior Applied AI Engineer role focused on embedding within enterprise customer environments to build and deploy production-grade AI agents. The role involves defining AI-driven solutions, owning end-to-end delivery, designing and running evaluations, and iterating on performance. It requires strong applied AI and backend experience, with a focus on real-world application and systems thinking. | Agent | 8 |
| Forward Deployed Engineer, Handshake AI Enterprise Forward Deployed Engineer to embed within enterprise customer environments, define AI-driven solutions, build and deploy production-grade AI agents, and design evals to measure and improve performance. The role requires full-stack capabilities with strong backend depth and real-world experience shipping AI applications. | AgentEval Gate | 8 |
| Software Engineer, Agentic Infrastructure Software Engineer focused on building the core agent orchestration layer, including tool use, memory, and multi-step reasoning systems, to power AI-driven features for millions of users. The role also involves designing evaluation, observability, and reliability frameworks for agent behavior and establishing engineering standards for agentic development. | Agent | 8 |
| Senior Software Engineer, Agentic Infrastructure Senior Software Engineer to architect and build the foundational systems for AI agents, including tool use, memory, and multi-step reasoning. The role involves designing evaluation and observability frameworks, establishing engineering standards for agentic development, and partnering with ML/product teams to ship agent-powered features. | Agent | 8 |
| Technical Lead Manager, Handshake AI Technical Lead Manager for Handshake AI, focusing on building and shipping production AI solutions. This player-coach role requires hands-on coding, system architecture, and team leadership, working with frontier AI labs on data, evals, and AI systems. | Ship | 8 |
| Staff Software Engineer, RLE Staff Software Engineer to lead the architecture and evolution of Handshake's Reinforcement Learning Environments (RLE) platform, focusing on scalable systems, data pipelines, and enabling rapid domain creation for frontier AI models. This role involves technical leadership, system design, and cross-team collaboration to ensure reliability, observability, and performance. | DataEval Gate | 8 |
| Senior Engineering Manager, Reinforcement Learning Environments (RLE) Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Reinforcement Learning Environments (RLE) team, responsible for building interactive sandboxes that simulate end-to-end workflows for frontier models. The team generates high-signal interaction data used for training and evaluating models on task completion, quality, and robustness. The role involves leading a team of engineers, owning the RLE roadmap, driving architecture for scalable systems, and ensuring reliability and data quality. | Post-trainEval Gate | 8 |
| Data Development, Principal This Principal Data Development role focuses on sourcing, negotiating, and closing data partnerships with companies and institutions to supply proprietary real-world data to frontier AI labs for training next-generation AI models. The role involves translating data requirements between AI labs and enterprise leaders, structuring commercial and compensation models, and managing senior stakeholder relationships. | Data | 7 |
| Senior Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering Senior Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering at Handshake AI. This role involves technical leadership and people management for a team of 10+ engineers focused on customer-facing AI solutions. The manager will contribute to technical strategy, architecture, and code, while also developing the team and defining the FDE operating model. The role requires strong technical credibility, customer engagement skills, and experience in building reusable platforms. | Agent | 7 |
| Strategic Projects Lead This role is responsible for owning the execution of large-scale human data programs that directly power frontier AI model training and evaluation. The role involves managing hundreds to thousands of expert Fellows, designing staffing models, and partnering with AI labs and senior stakeholders to deliver programs with significant ARR-equivalent impact. The ideal candidate has a technical background, strong analytical and problem-solving skills, and experience in technical or analytical roles. | Data | 7 |
| Strategic Projects Lead, Coding This role leads coding data initiatives for AI and platform teams, managing SWE Fellows, designing evaluation workflows, and ensuring delivery, margins, and quality. It involves writing coding assessments, building review processes, instrumenting quality signals, and adapting workflows. The role requires strong technical and analytical skills, with experience in coding, data quality, and stakeholder management, bridging ML/product/engineering and operations. | Data | 7 |
| Senior Forward Deployed Engineer Senior Forward Deployed Engineer at Handshake AI, focusing on technical leadership for AI lab deployments. This role involves understanding customer needs, architecting and building solutions, and scaling them for production, operating across the stack in ambiguous environments. Experience with LLMs and customer-facing roles is highly valued. | Agent | 7 |
| Strategic Projects Lead, Coding This role involves leading coding data initiatives for AI and platform teams, coordinating SWE Fellows, designing and owning technical evaluation and annotation workflows, and ensuring delivery, margins, quality, and customer relationships. Responsibilities include writing and validating coding assessments, building rubric-driven code review processes, instrumenting quality signals, and adapting workflows. The role requires strong technical and analytical skills, coding proficiency, and stakeholder management. | Data | 7 |
| AI Tutor, Electrochemistry & Functional Materials Specialist (contract), Handshake AI This role involves designing and evaluating chemistry prompts for AI models, focusing on scientific reasoning and identifying model breakdowns. The specialist will act as a subject matter expert in electrochemistry and functional materials, applying adversarial prompting and assessing the accuracy of AI-generated responses. | Eval Gate | 7 |
| AI Tutor, Organic & Polymer Chemistry Specialist (NMR/Spectroscopy) (contract), Handshake AI This role focuses on evaluating AI models in chemistry, specifically using expertise in organic chemistry, polymer chemistry, and spectroscopy (NMR) to design prompts, assess model outputs, and identify reasoning errors. The specialist will contribute to quality standards and provide feedback to the AI team. | Eval Gate | 7 |
| AI Tutor, Biophysical & Computational Chemistry Specialist (contract), Handshake AI Role focuses on evaluating AI models in chemistry, designing prompts, assessing outputs, and identifying reasoning errors. Requires PhD in Chemistry and experience in AI data annotation or RLHF. | Eval Gate | 7 |
| AI Tutor, Biology Specialist (contract), Handshake AI The role focuses on evaluating and stress-testing complex scientific prompts for large language models, specifically in biology. The specialist will design high-difficulty prompts, identify reasoning errors and weaknesses in model outputs, and apply adversarial prompting techniques. This is a research-oriented role focused on improving AI model capabilities through expert evaluation. | Eval Gate | 7 |
| AI Tutor, Physics Specialist (contract), Handshake AI This role focuses on evaluating AI models, specifically in physics, by crafting and assessing challenging problems, probing model reasoning, and identifying failures using adversarial prompting. It involves providing expert critique of AI responses and ensuring quality benchmarks are met. Prior experience in AI data annotation or RLHF is required, with a PhD in Physics or a related field. | Eval GatePost-train | 7 |
| Technical Lead Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering Technical Lead Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering at Handshake AI. This player-coach role involves shipping end-to-end AI solutions for strategic partners, designing and building integrations, tooling, APIs, and workflows, and managing a small team of FDEs. The focus is on building production-ready systems and scaling team output through reusable components, while staying hands-on with coding. | Agent | 7 |
| Machine Learning Engineer, PhD Intern Machine Learning Engineer Intern at Handshake AI, focusing on building intelligent product experiences for job seekers. The role involves developing, evaluating, and deploying ML models for search, recommendations, and matching systems in a production environment. Requires a PhD candidate with Python, PyTorch/TensorFlow, and ML operations experience. | AgentEval Gate | 7 |
| Software Engineer II, RLE Software Engineer to build and scale Reinforcement Learning Environments (RLE) platform, which are interactive systems for frontier AI models to learn real-world tasks. The role involves owning components end-to-end, designing backend systems and data pipelines, and improving system reliability and performance, supporting model training and evaluation. | DataEval Gate | 7 |
| Software Engineer I , Coding Pod Software Engineer on the Coding Pod will build data infrastructure and pipelines for frontier AI coding models, focusing on creating large-scale, high-quality benchmark datasets for evaluating model performance on coding tasks. This role involves owning end-to-end data pipelines, integrating with developer ecosystems, and working with evaluation systems and agentic coding tools. | DataEval Gate | 7 |
| Associate Software Engineer, RLE Associate Software Engineer to build Reinforcement Learning Environments (RLE) platform, including supporting infrastructure, backend systems, frontend interfaces, and data pipelines for model training and evaluation. The role involves creating modular workflow domains and working with senior engineers to improve system reliability and performance. | DataPost-train | 7 |
| Software Engineer I, RLE Software Engineer to build and scale the Reinforcement Learning Environments (RLE) platform, which involves designing and implementing backend systems, data pipelines, and modular workflow domains to support frontier AI model training and evaluation. The role requires experience in backend/distributed systems, ML-adjacent infrastructure, and cloud technologies. | DataEval Gate | 7 |
| Senior Software Engineer, RLE Senior Software Engineer to build and scale Reinforcement Learning Environments (RLE) platform, simulating real-world workflows for AI model training and evaluation. This role involves driving architecture for scalable systems and data generation pipelines, partnering with research and product teams, and ensuring system reliability and observability. | DataEval Gate | 7 |
| Senior Software Engineer, FDE Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to serve as a technical leader at the intersection of engineering and strategic customers (leading AI labs). Owns end-to-end lifecycle of high-impact deployments, architecting, building, and scaling solutions to improve customer workflows and model performance. Operates across the stack in ambiguous, fast-changing environments. | Agent | 7 |
| Machine Learning PhDs - AI Trainer Machine Learning PhDs needed for hourly contract work to evaluate AI-generated content and provide feedback on machine learning reasoning, proof construction, and technical problem-solving. This role focuses on assessing AI responses for accuracy, rigor, and relevance to real-world physics research. | Eval Gate | 7 |
| Machine Learning Engineer I This Machine Learning Engineer role focuses on developing and deploying ML models that directly impact user experience and business metrics for a consumer platform. The role involves end-to-end ownership of the ML lifecycle, working with cutting-edge infrastructure like embedding-based retrieval and multi-stage rankers, and contributing to responsible AI practices. | Ship | 7 |
| Senior Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering Senior Engineering Manager to lead and scale a team of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) focused on customer-facing AI solutions for strategic partners. The role involves building the organizational structure, managing technical execution, and ensuring reliability and maintainability of AI products. | Ship | 7 |
| Associate Machine Learning Engineer Associate Machine Learning Engineer for the Growth Relevance team, focusing on developing, deploying, and enhancing ML systems for lifecycle optimization, personalized notifications, and monetization strategies. The role involves working with embedding-based retrieval, GNNs, and multi-stage rankers, and contributing to responsible AI practices. | AgentServe | 7 |
| Staff Forward Deployed Engineer Staff Forward Deployed Engineer role at Handshake AI, focusing on defining and driving technical strategy for engineered solutions to strategic customers, including leading AI labs. The role involves architecting and delivering production-grade systems, setting technical direction, and influencing product and platform architecture. It requires deep customer engagement and scaling forward-deployed engineering as a function, with a strong emphasis on customer-facing AI products. | Ship | 7 |
| Software Engineer, Consumer Experience Software Engineer role focused on building core consumer experiences, including agentic AI features for students using OpenAI APIs and agentic frameworks. The company also has a separate AI data business focused on frontier AI labs. | Agent | 7 |
| Manager, Strategic Projects Manager, Strategic Projects leading a team focused on AI data and evaluation work. Responsibilities include managing SPLs, driving project delivery (data pipelines, labeling workflows), translating needs into plans, owning performance metrics, ensuring a good experience for fellows, and partnering with Product/Engineering on tooling. Success involves consistent delivery, improved operational metrics, and strong team leadership. Requires 5+ years in operations, 2+ years managing teams, and experience with complex projects, ideally in AI data operations or ML ops. | DataEval Gate | 7 |