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Handshake AI is building the fastest-growing AI data business in history, working directly with frontier AI labs to create evaluations, benchmarks, and push the boundaries of AI capabilities. The company has grown from $0 to ~$1B run rate and pays ~$60M to over 30K individuals monthly.
As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer on the Enterprise AI team, you will embed directly inside enterprise customer environments as part of a small, expert team. You'll develop deep understanding of each customer's business—their workflows, bottlenecks, and leverage points—and translate that into production-grade AI agents that measurably change how they operate.
This is a full-stack ownership role, not implementation or consulting. You will define solutions, build and deploy agents, design evaluations, and iterate until performance moves. Over time, you'll become a genuine domain expert in your customer's vertical and use that expertise to continuously improve the AI systems you build.
Key responsibilities include:
- Embedding directly with enterprise customers, developing deep business understanding
- Defining AI-driven solutions based on real business needs
- Building and deploying production-grade agents tailored to specific use cases with end-to-end ownership
- Designing and running evaluations to measure agent performance; iterating systematically
- Becoming a domain expert in your customer's vertical
- Working closely with Product and Platform engineers to ship cohesive, reliable solutions
- Establishing engineering best practices, agent patterns, and reusable frameworks to scale team output
- Surfacing deployment insights that inform platform and product roadmap
The role is based in San Francisco with 5 days per week in-office.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5-6+ years of engineering experience with full-stack capabilities and strong backend depth
- Real-world experience building and shipping AI applications in production (not just fine-tuning or prototyping)
- Strong understanding of agent architectures, evaluations, and how to measure and systematically improve AI performance
- Comfort working directly with enterprise customers in ambiguous, high-stakes environments
- Strong systems thinking—ability to zoom between business problems and technical solutions
- High ownership mentality focused on outcomes, not just outputs
- Strong communication skills; ability to work with senior stakeholders and earn trust quickly
DESIRABLE:
- Background at a company with forward deployment or field engineering model
- Experience building multi-agent systems in production
- Domain expertise in enterprise verticals (recruiting, finance, ops, legal, etc.)
- Familiarity with enterprise security, VPC deployments, or on-prem configurations
- History building evaluations infrastructure or AI quality measurement tooling
