About Handshake

Handshake is the career network for the AI economy. 20 million knowledge workers, 1,600 educational institutions, 1 million employers (including 100% of the Fortune 50), and every foundational AI lab trust Handshake to power career discovery, hiring, and upskilling, from freelance AI training gigs to first internships to full-time careers and beyond. This unique value is leading to unparalleled growth; in 2025, we tripled our ARR at scale.

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

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

• Join a team with leadership from Scale AI, Meta, xAI, Notion, Coinbase, and Palantir, among others

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

About the Role

As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll define and drive the technical strategy for how Handshake delivers engineered solutions to our most strategic customers, including leading AI labs. You'll operate as a trusted technical partner to both customers and internal leadership—owning the vision for how forward-deployed engineering scales as a function, while remaining deeply hands-on in solving our hardest deployment challenges. Your work will directly shape product direction, influence platform architecture, and set the technical bar for the entire forward-deployed engineering team.

This is a unique opportunity to pair organization-wide technical influence with direct customer impact—establishing the playbook for how Handshake's most critical partnerships are built, delivered, and scaled.

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

• Define the technical strategy and architectural vision for forward-deployed engineering, ensuring solutions are scalable, repeatable, and aligned with Handshake's platform roadmap.

• Serve as the senior technical point of contact for our most complex and highest-value customer engagements, including leading AI labs, translating strategic business needs into engineering direction.

• Drive cross-functional alignment between forward-deployed engineering, product, platform, and customer-facing teams to ensure deployed solutions inform and improve the core product.

• Architect and deliver production-grade systems for novel, high-ambiguity customer challenges—setting the standard for quality, reliability, and performance.

• Establish engineering best practices, design patterns, and reusable frameworks that enable the forward-deployed team to scale output without sacrificing quality.

• Mentor and develop senior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and customer empathy across the team.

• Identify systemic gaps in tooling, infrastructure, or process and lead initiatives to address them, reducing friction for future deployments.

Desired Capabilities

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time in customer-facing, solutions-oriented, or forward-deployed roles at high-growth companies.

• Proven ability to set technical direction and drive architectural decisions that span multiple teams or systems.

• Expert-level proficiency with ReactJS and TypeScript, with deep knowledge of frontend performance, component architecture, and design systems.

• Strong command of relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL), data modeling, system design, and distributed systems principles.

• Extensive experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP), CI/CD pipelines, and operating production systems at scale.

• Track record of leading ambiguous, high-stakes technical initiatives from zero-to-one with minimal direction.

• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to influence senior leadership, external partners, and cross-functional teams.

• Demonstrated impact in mentoring engineers, shaping team culture, and elevating engineering standards across an organization.

Extra Credit

• Experience defining the technical strategy for LLM-powered or AI-native products deployed in production, customer-facing environments.

• Background in building and scaling forward-deployed, solutions engineering, or professional services engineering functions from the ground up.

• History of contributing to or driving platform/infrastructure decisions that improved developer velocity or deployment reliability across teams.

• Experience partnering directly with C-level or VP-level s