Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, Enterprise AI

Forward Deployed Engineer At Handshake AI EnterpriseAs a Forward Deployed Engineer at Handshake AI Enterprise, you'll embed directly inside enterprise customer environments as part of a small, expert team. You'll learn each customer's business deeply — their workflows, their bottlenecks, where the real leverage is — and translate that understanding into production-grade AI agents that measurably change how they operate.This isn't an implementation or consulting role. You'll own the full stack: defining the solution, building and deploying agents, designing evals, and iterating until performance actually moves. Over time, you'll become a genuine domain expert in your customer's vertical — and use that expertise to build AI that keeps getting better.If you've built AI that works in the real world and want to do it again at much higher stakes — with better data, closer lab relationships, and a founding team that moves fast — this is the role.Embed directly with enterprise customers as part of a small deployment team, developing deep understanding of their business and workflowsDefine AI-driven solutions based on real business needs — not theoretical use casesBuild and deploy production-grade agents tailored to specific customer use cases, owning end-to-end deliveryDesign and run evals to measure agent performance; iterate and hill-climb until results moveBecome a domain expert in your customer's vertical and use that expertise to build better AI over timeWork closely with Product and Platform engineers on your team to ship cohesive, reliable solutionsEstablish engineering best practices, agent patterns, and reusable frameworks that help the forward-deployed team scale output without sacrificing qualitySurface insights from deployments that inform Handshake's platform and product roadmapLocation: San Francisco, CA | 5 days / week in-officeDesired Capabilities5-6+ years of engineering experience, full-stack with strong backend depthReal-world experience building and shipping AI applications in production — not just fine-tuning or prototypingStrong understanding of agent architectures, evals, and how to measure and systematically improve AI performanceComfort working directly with enterprise customers in ambiguous, high-stakes environmentsStrong systems thinking — you can zoom out to the business problem and zoom in to the technical solution without losing either threadHigh ownership mentality — you care about outcomes, not just outputsStrong communication skills — you'll be in the room with senior stakeholders regularly and need to earn their trust quicklyExtra CreditBackground at a company with a forward deployment or field engineering modelExperience building multi-agent systems in productionDomain expertise in a specific enterprise vertical (recruiting, finance, ops, legal, etc.)Familiarity with enterprise security requirements, VPC deployments, or on-prem configurationsHistory of building evals infrastructure or AI quality measurement tooling