Senior Applied AI Engineer, Handshake AI Enterprise

About the role

As a Senior 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.

What You'll Do

• 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 team scale output without sacrificing quality
• Surface insights from deployments that inform Handshake's platform and product roadmap

What We're Looking For

• 5-6+ years of engineering experience, with strong applied AI and backend depth
• Real-world experience building and shipping AI applications in production, not just fine-tuning or prototyping
• A 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
• A 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

Location

San Francisco, CA | 5 days/week in-office

Extra Credit

• 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

Perks

• 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

Career at Handshake

Explore our mission, values, and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers. Compensation Range: $205K - $300K