Senior Applied AI Engineer, Enterprise AI

Job-ID: b777e140-6ccd-44e6-9709-5a43c4b1ca7aLocation: San Francisco, California, United States; New York City, New York, United StatesSalary: USD 220000 - 300000 yearEmployment type: FULL TIMEPosted: 2026-05-19About HandshakeHandshake was founded on a simple belief that everyone deserves a path to a great career, regardless of where they went to school or who they know. Today, we power 25 million job seekers, 1 million+ employers, and 1,600 educational institutions.In 2025, we started Handshake AI and built the fastest-growing AI data business in history. We work directly with frontier AI lab researchers to create evaluations, publish benchmarks, and push the boundary of data. We’ve grown from $0 to ~$1B run rate and pay ~$60M to over 30K individuals every month.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 feelPartner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world’s top educational institutionsWork together with engineers, scientists, operators, and more from Palantir, Meta, Scale AI, and former YC foundersBuild a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenueAbout Handshake AIHuman data is the core infrastructure to AI advancement. Frontier AI labs currently improve model capabilities with various data-intensive post-training techniques. We believe that data spend for AI training will increase by 3-5x in the next few years and continue for much longer as models take on new domains. Handshake AI supports all of the frontier AI labs, working on their most complex data at the largest scale.About the RoleAs an Applied AI 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.What You'll DoEmbed 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 team scale output without sacrificing qualitySurface insights from deployments that inform Handshake's platform and product roadmapWhat We're Looking For5-6+ years of engineering experience, full-stack with strong backend depthStrong applied AI engineering experience and 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 quicklyLocation: San Francisco, CA | 5 days/week in-officeExtra 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 toolingPerksHandshake delivers benefits that help you feel supported—and thrive at work and in life.The below benefits are for full-time US employees.ð Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing companyð Financial Wellness: 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coachingð¼ Family Support: Paid parental leave, fertility benefits, parental coachingð Wellbeing: Medical, dental, and vision, mental health support, $500 wellness stipendð Growth: $2,000 learning stipend, ongoing developmentð» Remote & Office: Internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF officeð Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex daysð Connection: Team outings & referral bonusesExplore our mission, values, and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.