Technical Lead Manager, Handshake AI

Handshake•San Francisco, CA

2d•Onsite

About The Position

Handshake AI is at the frontier of applied AI — working with world-class labs and partners on genuinely hard problems around human data, evals, and AI systems. The engineering team here ships production solutions that matter: reliable, observable, and built to scale. As a Tech Lead Manager, you're first and foremost a builder. You'll set technical direction for a small team of engineers while staying deeply hands-on — writing production code, architecting systems, and driving work forward. This is a player-coach role, ideal for a senior engineer ready to take on their first or second management scope without leaving the craft behind. The best person for this role leads by example, builds trust through technical credibility, and creates structure without bureaucracy.

Requirements

6+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful depth in backend, fullstack, or systems work.
Experience as a tech lead or TLM — setting technical direction for a team, not just owning your own work.
1–2 years managing a small team of engineers (3–6); comfortable with feedback, growth conversations, and performance.
Must be someone who codes regularly and wants to keep coding — this is not a transition-to-management role.
Experience working closely with non-engineering stakeholders (research, product, operations, or similar) — comfortable translating between technical and business context.
Strong communication skills: clear under pressure, able to present options and recommendations to varied audiences.
Sharp instincts on triage and prioritization across multiple concurrent workstreams.

Nice To Haves

Experience with AI/ML systems or production reliability in AI-adjacent environments.
Familiarity with distributed systems and backend architecture at scale.
Experience building reusable platforms or internal tooling from bespoke solutions.
Background working with or alongside research or operations-heavy organizations.

Responsibilities

Write production-quality code and architect systems that are reliable, observable, secure, and maintainable.
Set technical direction for a small team — define the approach, unblock engineers, and raise the bar on quality.
Manage and develop a team of 3–5 engineers: set expectations, have real feedback conversations, and help people grow.
Own end-to-end delivery across multiple concurrent workstreams — triage, prioritize, and flag scope or capacity issues early.
Design and build integrations, tooling, APIs, and internal systems in close collaboration with research, product, and operations teams.
Identify patterns across workstreams and build reusable components that scale the team's output.
Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders alike — translate tradeoffs into decisions and keep the right people informed.