Senior Engineering Manager, Quality & Annotations 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

We're hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to own two of HAI's core engineering teams, Quality and Annotations, leading a combined org of ~15 engineers. This role sits at a rare intersection: one team pushes the frontier of AI quality and evaluation tooling, while the other builds the extensible platform infrastructure that operators and fellows rely on every day.

• Lead quality engineering systems that directly improve AI output reliability, evaluation accuracy, and benchmark performance for frontier lab partners
• Own the annotations platform: operator workflows, tasking flows, and pipeline infrastructure that powers data delivery
• Build and scale an organization across two distinct technical domains, developing senior ICs and driving cross-team technical strategy
• Partner with internal stakeholders to prioritize platform investments that unlock other teams to move faster and build on top of shared infrastructure

Location: San Francisco, CA. This is an in-office role, 5 days/week (no remote/hybrid)

You Have

Must-Haves:

• 7+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years managing engineering teams of 8 or more and experience manager managers.
• Background at companies where AI is the core product; you've shipped in environments where model quality, data pipelines, and evaluation rigor are table stakes
• Strong product engineering instincts; you can lead teams building complex user-facing systems, not just backend infrastructure
• Experience leading teams with meaningfully different technical focuses simultaneously
• Track record of developing engineers; you've grown senior ICs, EMs, and leads, not just delivered projects
• Strong prioritization and stakeholder management
• Clear, direct communicator who can translate between technical complexity and business context

What we’re looking for

• Engineering leader + builder: 3+ years managing teams, plus 5+ years hands-on engineering experience
• Strong people leadership: experience leading senior engineers; managing an EM (or equivalent scope) is a plus
• Execution in ambiguity: proven ability to align cross-functionally and deliver in fast-moving, unclear problem spaces
• Systems + product mindset: strong platform/distributed systems background, and the ability to turn needs into a clear roadmap, ship iteratively, and measure outcomes

Bonus Points:

• Familiarity with LLM evaluation, quality pipelines, or applied AI tooling
• Experience with annotation or data labeling platforms, tasking systems, or workflow orchestration

We Offer