Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, Enterprise AI

About the role

Handshake AI builds data products for frontier AI labs, and its Enterprise team is looking for a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer. You will embed directly inside enterprise customer environments as part of a small, expert team, learning each customer's business deeply and turning that understanding into production-grade AI agents that change how they operate. This is not an implementation or consulting role: you define the solution, build and deploy agents, design evals and iterate until performance improves.

Key responsibilities

• Embed with enterprise customers and develop a deep understanding of their business and workflows
• Define AI-driven solutions based on real business needs, not theoretical use cases
• Build and deploy production-grade agents tailored to specific customer use cases, owning end-to-end delivery
• Design and run evals to measure agent performance and iterate until results move
• Become a domain expert in your customer's vertical and use that expertise to build better AI over time
• Work closely with Product and Platform engineers to ship cohesive, reliable solutions
• Establish engineering best practices, agent patterns and reusable frameworks so the team can scale output without sacrificing quality
• Share insights from deployments that inform Handshake's platform and product roadmap

Required profile

• 5-6+ years of engineering experience, full-stack with strong backend depth
• Real-world experience building and shipping AI applications in production, beyond fine-tuning or prototyping
• Strong understanding of agent architectures, evals and how to measure and systematically improve AI performance
• Comfort working directly with enterprise customers in ambiguous, high-stakes environments
• Strong systems thinking, high ownership and strong communication skills with senior stakeholders

Required skills

• Full-stack engineering with strong backend depth
• Agent architectures and evals

Preferred: background in a forward deployment or field engineering model, multi-agent systems in production, domain expertise in a vertical such as recruiting, finance, ops or legal, familiarity with enterprise security, VPC or on-prem setups, and experience building eval infrastructure or AI quality tooling. Location: San Francisco or New York, 5 days per week in the office.

What we offer

• Equity in a fast-growing company
• 401(k) match, competitive compensation and financial coaching
• Paid parental leave, fertility benefits and parental coaching
• Medical, dental, vision and mental health support, plus a $500 wellness stipend
• $2,000 learning stipend and ongoing development
• Internet, commuting and free lunch/gym at the SF office
• Flexible PTO, 15 holidays plus 2 flex days, team outings and referral bonuses