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

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 a Tech Lead Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering, you are first and foremost a builder. You'll spend the majority of your time writing code, designing systems, and shipping solutions directly alongside customers — while also owning the technical direction and day-to-day leadership of a small team of FDEs. This is a player-coach role: the best person for this job is someone who would be frustrated behind a desk managing full-time and wants to stay close to the craft.

This role is ideal for a senior engineer ready to take on their first or second management scope without leaving the work behind — someone who leads by example, builds trust through technical credibility, and creates structure without bureaucracy.

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

What you'll do

• Own and ship end-to-end technical solutions directly for Handshake AI's highest-priority customer engagements.

• Design and build integrations, tooling, APIs, and workflows in close collaboration with partner technical teams, researchers, and operators.

• Serve as the primary technical point of contact for key accounts — understanding their systems deeply and delivering solutions that work in production.

• Write production-quality code and architect systems that are reliable, observable, secure, and maintainable.

• Manage and develop a small team of 3–5 Forward Deployed Engineers — set expectations, unblock, and grow them.

• Own technical quality across the team's engagements — review work, raise the bar, and ensure strong engineering fundamentals.

• Help prioritize and triage across competing requests; flag capacity and scope issues early.

• Identify patterns across customer engagements and build the reusable components that scale the team's output.

Must haves

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful depth in backend, fullstack, or systems work.

• 2+ years in a customer-facing or field engineering role (e.g., forward deployed, solutions engineering, field engineering, customer-embedded product development).

• Experience as a tech lead or TLM — setting technical direction for a team, not just owning your own work.

• 1–2 years managing a small team of engineers (3–6); comfortable with feedback, growth conversations, and performance.

• Must be someone who codes regularly and wants to keep coding

• Ability to translate technical tradeoffs into business decisions; comfortable presenting options and recommendations to both technical and non-technical partners.

• Strong stakeholder management skills; builds trust quickly with external partners and communicates clearly under pressure.

• Strong instincts on triage and prioritization across multiple concurrent engagements.

Nice to haves

• Experience with AI/ML product integrations or production reliability in AI systems.

• Familiarity with distributed systems and backend architecture at scale.

• Experience building reusable platforms or internal tooling from bespoke customer solutions.

• Background working with operations-heavy or research-adjacent organizations.

Why join now

• Stay close to the craft while growing as a leader — this role is built for engineers who don't want to stop building.

• Work on genuinely hard problems at the frontier of applied AI with world-class lab