Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, Enterprise AI

About Handshake

Handshake powers 25 million job seekers, 1 million+ employers, and 1,600 educational institutions. In 2025, we started Handshake AI, working directly with frontier AI lab researchers to create evaluations, publish benchmarks, and advance AI data infrastructure.

About the Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Handshake AI Enterprise, you will embed directly inside enterprise customer environments as part of a small, expert deployment team. You will translate customer workflows and bottlenecks into production-grade AI agents.

You will own the full stack: defining the solution, building and deploying agents, designing evals, and iterating until performance moves.

Responsibilities

• Embed directly with enterprise customers to develop a deep understanding of their business and workflows
• Define AI-driven solutions based on real business needs
• Build and deploy production-grade agents tailored to specific customer use cases, owning end-to-end delivery
• Design and run evals to measure agent performance; iterate and hill-climb until results move
• Become a domain expert in your customer's vertical to build better AI over time
• Work closely with Product and Platform engineers on your team to ship cohesive, reliable solutions
• Establish engineering best practices, agent patterns, and reusable frameworks to scale output
• Surface insights from deployments that inform Handshake's platform and product roadmap

Desired Capabilities

• 5-6+ years of engineering experience, full-stack with strong backend depth
• Real-world experience building and shipping AI applications in production (not just fine-tuning or prototyping)
• Strong understanding of agent architectures, evals, and how to measure and systematically improve AI performance
• Comfort working directly with enterprise customers in ambiguous, high-stakes environments
• Strong systems thinking across business problems and technical solutions
• High ownership mentality focused on outcomes
• Strong communication skills to earn trust with senior stakeholders quickly

Extra Credit

• Background at a company with a forward deployment or field engineering model
• Experience building multi-agent systems in production
• Domain expertise in a specific enterprise vertical (recruiting, finance, ops, legal, etc.)
• Familiarity with enterprise security requirements, VPC deployments, or on-prem configurations
• History of building evals infrastructure or AI quality measurement tooling