Associate 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 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.

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.

As an Associate Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll work alongside senior engineers and directly with our customers, leading AI labs, to help solve their most pressing technical challenges. You'll support the design and deployment of solutions that impact customer workflows and model performance, working across the stack, shipping quickly, and iterating based on real-world feedback. This is a fast-paced, high-exposure role where you'll learn by doing in ambiguous, constantly evolving environments.

This is a unique opportunity early in your career to combine hands-on engineering with direct customer engagement, building not just the "what" but the "how" of our most important deployments.

• Partner with AI labs and internal engineering and operations teams to help identify needs, gather requirements, and support solution design.

• Work on custom asks from customers to help rapidly prototype and deploy tailored solutions that address unique, high-impact challenges.

• Tackle complex technical problems with support from senior engineers, taking increasing ownership of delivery from concept through deployment.

• Rapidly prototype, test, and iterate on tools in response to real-time feedback.

• Contribute to architectural discussions and help establish best practices for reliability, scalability, and security in high-impact deployments.

• Document solutions and help create technical playbooks for repeatable, scalable deployment processes.

• 0–2 years of professional software engineering experience (internships, co-ops, or project-based work count).

• Familiarity with ReactJS and TypeScript, with an eye for detail, usability, and accessibility.

• Foundational understanding of relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL) and data modeling concepts.

• Some exposure to cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) and deployment pipelines.

• Passion for clean, maintainable code and building reliable, performant systems.

• Strong communication skills and a willingness to collaborate across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, dynamic environment with a hunger to learn and grow.

• Coursework, projects, or internship experience involving LLMs or other AI-powered products.

• Familiarity with component libraries, design systems, or building reusable interfaces.

• Interest in or exposure to performance optimization and scaling of frontend or full-stack applications.