About Handshake

Handshake 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 feel

• Partner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world’s top educational institutions

• Work together with engineers, scientists, operators, and more from Palantir, Meta, Scale AI, and former YC founders

• Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue
  

About Handshake AI

Human 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.

As we continue to invest in our engineering organization in India, we're building a high-performing team that partners closely with our US engineering teams to develop the platforms powering the next generation of AI.

About the Role

We're hiring a Director of Engineering to build and scale our Reinforcement Learning Environments (RLE) engineering team in India.

RLE environments simulate end-to-end workflows across domains like software engineering, finance, and legal research, with realistic tools, constraints, and feedback loops. The platform generates high-signal interaction data researchers use to train and evaluate models for task completion, quality, and robustness.

This is a high-leverage role: you'll partner closely with engineering leaders in the US to build our India engineering organization from the ground up. You'll be expected to be hands-on early as you hire and grow the team, and over time build leadership capacity by developing senior engineers and engineering managers as the organization scales.

Location: Bengaluru, India. This is an in-office role.

What You'll Do

• Build, hire, and develop a high-performing engineering team building RL environments and the platform behind them

• Partner closely with Engineering, Research, Product, and Operations teams in the US to execute against a shared roadmap

• Drive architecture for scalable, reliable, extensible environment systems and data generation pipelines

• Build modular, plug-and-play domains that integrate cleanly with training and evaluation loops

• Raise the bar on reliability, observability, performance, and data quality

• Create a culture of ownership, speed, and strong engineering fundamentals in an ambiguity-heavy setting
  

What We're Looking For

• Engineering leader + builder: experience scaling engineering organizations while remaining technically engaged

• Strong people leadership: experience hiring and developing senior engineers; experience managing engineering managers is a strong plus

• Experience building engineering teams and organizations through periods of rapid growth

• Experience partnering closely with US-based engineering teams or globally distributed engineering organizations

• Execution in ambiguity: proven ability to align cross-functionally and deliver in fast-moving, unclear problem spaces

• Systems + product mindset: strong platform/distributed systems background, and the ability to turn research and operational needs into a clear roadmap, ship iteratively, and measure outcomes
  

Nice to Have

• Experience with RL training infrastructure, simulation systems, or evaluation platforms

• Human-in-the-loop systems (annotation, rubric tooling, QA pipelines, workflow platforms)

• Operations-heavy, tech-enabled environment experience

• Familiarity with AWS/GCP, APIs, Docker, and modern stacks (TypeScript/Node, React)

• Experience building systems used by applied ML or AI research teams
  

What Success Looks Like

• Build a world-class engineering organization in India that becomes a core extension of Handshake AI Engineering

• RLE becomes the default platform researchers use to train workflow-capable models

• New domains launch quickly and reliably with trusted quality gates

• Environment reliability and data quality are trusted inputs into training and evaluation decisions

• The India engineering team scales with strong technical leaders who can independently drive new verticals

• The platform measurably improves real-world task completion, robustness, and quality

Perks:

• Generous Equity Grant vested over 4 years

• Housing Bonus: 1.3 Lakhs spread throughout the first year

• Well Defined Performance Bonus ranging between 10 - 100% of base

• Medical Insurance Coverage

• Food credit for every in person day.