Forward Deployed Engineer, Handshake AI Enterprise

As 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.

Responsibilities

Embed directly with enterprise customers as part of a small deployment team, developing 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; iterate and hill-climb 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 on your team to ship cohesive, reliable solutions; Establish engineering best practices, agent patterns, and reusable frameworks that help the forward-deployed team scale output without sacrificing quality; Surface insights from deployments that inform Handshake's platform and product roadmap

Requirements

Full-stack engineering experience with strong backend depth; Real-world experience building and shipping AI applications in production — not just 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 — you can zoom out to the business problem and zoom in to the technical solution without losing either thread; High ownership mentality — you care about outcomes, not just outputs; Strong communication skills — you'll be in the room with senior stakeholders regularly and need to earn their trust quickly

Nice to have

Background at a company with a forward deployment or field engineering model; Experience building multi-agent systems in production; Domain expertise in a specific enterprise vertical (recruiting, finance, ops, legal, etc.); Familiarity with enterprise security requirements, VPC deployments, or on-prem configurations; History of building evals infrastructure or AI quality measurement tooling

Benefits

Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company; Financial Wellness: 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coaching; Family Support: Paid parental leave, fertility benefits, parental coaching; Wellbeing: Medical, dental, and vision, mental health support, $500 wellness stipend; Growth: $2,000 learning stipend, ongoing development; Remote & Office: Internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF office; Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days; Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses