Applied AI Engineer, Handshake AI Enterprise

Handshake•San Francisco, CA

1d•$157,000 - $175,000•Onsite

About The Position

As an Applied AI Engineer at Handshake AI Enterprise, you'll be part of a small, expert team embedded directly inside enterprise customer environments. You'll develop a deep understanding of each customer's business, their workflows, their bottlenecks, where the real leverage is, and help 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 meaningful parts of the full stack: building and deploying agents, running evals, and iterating until performance actually moves. You'll be supported by senior teammates but expected to bring real craft and ownership to everything you touch. If you've built AI that works in the real world and want to do it at higher stakes, with better data, closer lab relationships, and a founding team that moves fast, this is the role.

Requirements

2-5 years of engineering experience, with backend depth and some exposure to AI or ML systems in production
Hands-on experience building and shipping software in production, you care about whether it actually works
Familiarity with agent architectures or LLM-based systems, and curiosity to go deeper
Comfort with ambiguity, you don't need a perfect spec to start making progress
Strong communication skills, you'll interact with customers regularly and need to represent the team well
High ownership mentality, you care about outcomes, not just closing tickets

Nice To Haves

Any experience building or shipping AI applications in production
Exposure to enterprise environments or customer-facing engineering roles
Familiarity with evals, prompt engineering, or AI quality measurement
Domain knowledge in a specific enterprise vertical (recruiting, finance, ops, legal, etc.)

Responsibilities

Contribute to customer deployments as part of a small team, developing genuine understanding of their business and workflows
Build and deploy production-grade agents tailored to specific customer use cases
Design and run evals to measure agent performance; iterate and hill-climb until results move
Work closely with Senior Engineers, Product, and Platform teammates to ship cohesive, reliable solutions
Contribute to engineering best practices, agent patterns, and reusable frameworks as the team scales
Surface insights from deployments that inform Handshake's platform and product roadmap