Handshake
Senior AI Forward Deployed Engineer
San Francisco, CA · Senior · Full-time
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 13 days ago
PythonMachine LearningData EngineeringLLMsResearchCommunication
About the role
- You think like a researcher and ship like an engineer.
- You default to action and figure things out in motion.
- This is a rare role: deep AI knowledge, real customer ownership, and the chance to influence how frontier models get trained.
Responsibilities
- Design and deliver evaluation frameworks, annotation pipelines, and benchmark infrastructure tailored to each lab's training methodology
- Partner directly with AI lab researchers to understand their post-training goals and data requirements, translating ambiguous research questions into scoped, executable projects
- Prototype and iterate fast: stand up lightweight experiments, run evals, and interpret results in tight feedback loops with research partners
- Make key design decisions around data quality and evaluation design that hold up at scale
- Identify and document repeatable patterns across lab engagements to accelerate future deployments
Requirements
- 6+ years of experience in applied ML, AI research engineering, or a closely related field with real exposure to model training workflows and post-training techniques
- Hands-on experience fine-tuning or lightweight optimization of ML models (Tinker, LoRA, PEFT, or similar).
- Strong prioritization instincts: you know how to triage across multiple urgent customer needs and guide your team toward the highest-leverage work
- Track record of leading technical projects end-to-end in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
- Experience with evaluation design for LLMs or RLHF pipelines in production customer environments
- Prior experience in a forward-deployed, solutions engineering, or technical consulting role at a high-growth AI company
- Familiarity with annotation platform tooling, quality control frameworks, or human feedback collection at scale
Skills
- Experience with ML data pipelines and the tooling around them (e.g., data labeling systems, eval frameworks, quality metrics)
Compensation
- 💰 Financial Wellness: 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coaching
Benefits
- Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supported-and 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, $500 wellness stipend
- 📚 Growth: $2,000 learning stipend, ongoing development
- 💻 Office: Commuting support, free lunch, and gym in our SF office
- 🏝 Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days
- Partner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world's top educational institutions
- Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue
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This listing is sourced directly from Handshake's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.