Senior Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

About Handshake

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.

Why join Handshake now:

Shape how every career evolves in the AI economy, at global scale, with impact your friends, family and peers can see and feel

Partner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world’s top educational institutions

Work together with engineers, scientists, operators, and more from Palantir, Meta, Scale AI, and former YC founders

Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue

About Handshake AI

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.

About The Role

Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is the engineering team that unblocks high-priority, customer-facing work for Handshake AI's most strategic partners. FDEs are technical builders: they ship end-to-end solutions in close collaboration with researchers, operators, and partner technical teams.

As Senior Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering, you sit at the intersection of technical leadership and people management keeping one hand on the hardest customer problems while building and developing a team of 10 engineers across multiple engagements. You'll stay technically engaged, writing code and designing systems alongside your team, but your primary leverage is creating the conditions for exceptional engineering: setting the technical and operational standard for the FDE organization, shaping strategy and structure, and growing the people who deliver it.

This is a player-coach role at scale. You lead by example technically, develop strong TLMs and senior ICs beneath you, and build the systems and playbooks that make the team compounding. The best person for this job knows when to step in, reviewing designs, challenging assumptions, and rolling up their sleeves on the hardest problems, and when to step back and let the team they've built carry the weight.

Location: San Francisco, CA | 5 days/week in-office

What you'll do

Own the technical strategy and delivery quality across all of FDE's highest-priority customer engagements.

Stay close to the craft, contribute to architecture, design reviews, and production solutions on the most complex accounts.

Lead and develop a team of 10+ FDEs, including Tech Lead Managers, set the bar, unblock, and grow the next generation of technical leaders.

Serve as the executive technical point of contact for Handshake AI's most strategic partners; build deep trust through credibility, clarity, and execution.

Define and evolve the FDE operating model, how the team scopes, staffs, ships, and measures success across engagements.

Identify patterns across the portfolio and drive the development of reusable platforms, tooling, and internal infrastructure that multiply team output.

Partner closely with Sales, Research, and Product to shape how new customer relationships are structured and handed off.

Own capacity planning, hiring, and organizational design for the FDE function as it scales.

You Have
Must-Haves:

8+ years of engineering, solutions engineering, or technical delivery experience, with meaningful depth in backend, fullstack, or systems w…