{"id":16685,"url":"https://alion.io/job/handshake-senior-ai-forward-deployed-engineer","title":"Member of Technical Staff, Post-Training","company":{"id":5000,"name":"Handshake","domain":"joinhandshake.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/handshake","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":true,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":89,"open_postings":11,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.455,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":47,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States","New York, United States","Mountain View, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":200000,"max":350000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":350000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"DPO","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LoRA","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"PEFT","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"PPO","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Reward Modeling","optional":false},{"name":"RLHF","optional":false},{"name":"Scale AI","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false},{"name":"Transformers","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-08T16:49:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-21","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T06:36:24Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":101,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":1,"flags":[],"days_open":101},"description":"About Handshake\nHandshake's mission is to organize expert human knowledge to advance the AI economy. Handshake AI works directly with frontier labs on their most consequential data, evaluation, and post-training challenges, building the systems that turn expert human knowledge into the data and evaluations that make frontier models better.\nYou will work alongside engineers, researchers, operators, and builders from organizations including Scale AI, Meta, Google, Amazon, xAI, Notion, and Palantir-and help build the systems that make expert human knowledge useful for advancing AI.\nAbout Handshake Labs\nHandshake Labs is building external AI products, research platforms, and customer-facing AI systems. We are evolving work that is often custom-built for an individual partner into reusable products and platforms that improve with every deployment.\nOur work spans the full post-training loop: designing evaluations and training environments, building high-quality data and feedback systems, running experiments, and turning what works into durable infrastructure. For example, we are developing agents that can analyze long, complex coding-agent sessions in days rather than weeks-with expert review and calibration built into the system.\nThe Role\nWe are hiring a Member of Technical Staff, Post-Training to help define and build this new organization. This is a broad, high-ownership role for researchers who build. You may come from research science, research engineering, machine learning engineering, or a closely related background; what matters is the ability to reason deeply about model improvement and turn that reasoning into reliable systems.\nYou will partner with researchers, domain experts, and customers to turn ambiguous post-training questions into experiments, evaluation frameworks, data pipelines, and products. Early members of the team will have unusual influence over our technical direction, operating culture, and the reusable systems we build.\nWe care more about demonstrated research capability, technical judgment, and a builder’s mindset than a specific title, degree, or career path.\nLocation: San Francisco & Mountain View preferred; we are open to exceptional candidates in other locations.\nWhat you’ll do\nDesign post-training systems and methodologies for frontier models, including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, preference optimization, reward modeling, and related approaches.\n\nTranslate open-ended research or partner needs into clear hypotheses, experiments, evaluation plans, and production-quality implementations.\n\nBuild and improve evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, training environments, data-processing pipelines, and quality-control systems.\n\nRun fast, rigorous iteration loops: prototype, evaluate, interpret results, and turn learnings into the next system or product.\n\nPartner directly with AI researchers and domain experts to develop high-signal data, feedback, and evaluation methods.\n\nIdentify repeatable patterns across engagements and productize them into reusable software and platforms.\n\nRaise the technical bar through strong design judgment, clear communication, code quality, and mentorship.\n\nContribute to the field through benchmarks, open-source tools, research, and technical writing where it creates leverage.\n\nWhat we’re looking for\n3+ years of demonstrated strength in post-training, fine-tuning, or model-evaluation work. Relevant experience may include RL, SFT, LoRA/PEFT, full fine-tuning, RLHF, DPO, PPO, reward modeling, or training environments.\n\nStrong Python skills and the ability to write clean, efficient, scalable software.\n\nHands-on experience with modern ML tooling, particularly PyTorch and large-scale data, training, or evaluation workflows.\n\nSound experimental judgment: you can form hypotheses, choose meaningful metrics, diagnose failures, and distinguish signal from noise.\n\nExperience designing systems-not only implementing specifications-including the ability to make tradeoffs around quality, scale, reliability, and reuse.\n\nComfort operating in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment with substantial ownership.\n\nCollaborative, low-ego communication and the ability to work effectively with researchers, engineers, domain experts, and customers.\n\nEspecially compelling experience\nBuilding or operating large-scale ML training, inference, data, or evaluation systems.\n\nDeveloping LLM/agent benchmarks, evaluation methodologies, annotation systems, or data-quality frameworks.\n\nResearch or applied work on reinforcement learning, alignment, model behavior, synthetic data, or human-in-the-loop systems.\n\nPublished research, meaningful open-source contributions, or evidence of technical leadership in ML systems or AI research.\n\nExperience productizing research or repeated customer work into robust, reusable platforms.\n\nWhy join\nWork on problems at the center of how frontier AI systems improve, alongside leading labs and domain experts.\n\nHelp build an early technical organization where your work shapes the roadmap, standards, and culture.\n\nMove fluidly from research insight to real-world systems, with the resources and customer context to see those systems matter.\n\nJoin a company building durable infrastructure for careers in the AI economy.\n\nPerks\nHandshake delivers benefits that help you feel supported-and thrive at work and in life.\nThe below benefits are for full-time US employees.\nOwnership: Equity in a fast-growing company\nFinancial Wellness: 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coaching\nFamily Support: Paid parental leave, fertility benefits, parental coaching\nWellbeing: Medical, dental, and vision, mental health support, $500 wellness stipend\nGrowth: $2,000 learning stipend, ongoing development\nOffice: Commuting support, free lunch, and gym in our SF office\nTime Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days\nConnection: Team outings & referral bonuses","description_format":"text","description_chars":5905,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Job Boards & Aggregators","AI Training Data & Annotation","Professional Networks"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-07-08T16:49:00Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-09-15T23:33:06Z"},{"event":"reopen","at":"2026-09-21T20:34:31Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":18,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.627,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":100,"expected_fill_days":47,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":350000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/handshake-senior-ai-forward-deployed-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/handshake-senior-ai-forward-deployed-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-18T09:16:34Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":13807,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-19T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":5000},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=5000"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fhandshake-senior-ai-forward-deployed-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fhandshake-senior-ai-forward-deployed-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fhandshake-senior-ai-forward-deployed-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/handshake-senior-ai-forward-deployed-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fhandshake-senior-ai-forward-deployed-engineer"}]}