Forward Deployed Engineer I, Handshake AI at Handshake — San Francisco, CA

# About Handshake

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

# About the Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll work at the intersection of our engineering organization and our most strategic customers, including leading AI labs. You'll contribute to the full lifecycle of high-impact deployments—helping scope technical requirements, building and iterating on solutions that directly improve customer workflows and model performance. You'll operate across the stack in ambiguous, fast-changing environments, working closely with senior engineers to shape how we approach our most critical partnerships.

This is a unique opportunity to combine hands-on technical work with direct customer engagement—learning how to deliver at the highest level while growing your skills in a forward-deployed environment.

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

• Partner with AI labs and cross-functional stakeholders to understand technical challenges, help translate requirements into actionable engineering plans, and contribute to alignment across teams.
• Build and iterate on tailored, production-grade solutions for complex customer needs, often with guidance from senior engineers and minimal existing playbooks.
• Participate actively in code reviews and contribute to best practices for forward-deployed work.
• Contribute to architectural discussions around reliability, scalability, and security, and help implement repeatable deployment patterns.
• Rapidly prototype, test, and iterate on tools in response to real-time feedback, balancing speed of delivery with long-term maintainability.
• Help create and maintain technical documentation and frameworks that enable the team to scale deployments efficiently.

Desired Capabilities

• 1-4 years of professional software engineering experience, ideally including some exposure to customer-facing, solutions-oriented, or forward-deployed work.
• Strong proficiency with ReactJS and TypeScript, with a solid bar for code quality, usability, and accessibility.
• Good understanding of relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL), data modeling, and system design fundamentals.
• Some experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP), deployment pipelines, and production operations.
• Demonstrated ability to contribute to technical projects in ambiguous environments with shifting requirements.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to build trust with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Eagerness to learn from and collaborate with senior engineers, with growing interest in raising the bar on engineering practices.

Extra Credit

• Exposure to architecting or delivering systems for LLMs or other AI-powered products in customer-facing environments.
• Experience contributing to component libraries, design systems, or reusable frameworks.
• Some experience with performance optimization of full-stack applications.
• Interest in or early experience with forward-deployed, solutions engineering, technical consulting, or customer facing work.

Perks