{"id":905410,"url":"https://alion.io/job/handshake-senior-forward-deployed-engineer-bulgaria","title":"Forward Deployed Engineer II (Bulgaria)","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":88,"open_postings":6,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.5,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":49,"computed_at":"2026-11-06T05:58:05Z"}},"role":"Solutions","role_family":"Solutions","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Sofia, Bulgaria"],"countries":["BG"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":56000,"max":83000,"currency":"EUR","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":93168},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":4,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Scale AI","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-14T06:03:56Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-14","last_verified_at":"2026-11-06T13:18:23Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":53,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":53},"description":"About Handshake\nHandshake 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.\nIn 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.\nWhy join Handshake now:\nShape how every career evolves in the AI economy, at global scale, with impact your friends, family, and peers can see and feel\n\nPartner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners, and the world’s top educational institutions\n\nWork together with engineers, scientists, operators, and more from Palantir, Meta, Scale AI, and former YC founders\n\nBuild a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue\n\nAbout Handshake AI\nHuman 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.\nAbout the role\nLocation: Sofia, Bulgaria. This role is based out of our Sofia office and is not eligible for full-time remote work.\nWe are growing our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team in Sofia, which today consists of six engineers and works alongside a team of 20+ engineers in San Francisco.\nForward Deployed Engineering is a title we apply to software engineers who work much closer to the customer than a typical product engineer. At the root of the role is a strong software engineer - someone who understands technical systems, can hold the bigger picture, and can go deep into the weeds when a system breaks. What differs is the scope. You find the problem, decide whether it is even an engineering problem, scope the solution, and then either build it yourself or write the tickets and consult while a product team builds it.\nAs a senior member of the team, your judgment shapes how we approach our most critical partnerships, and you will set the standard for how forward-deployed work gets done from Sofia. Because of the time zone, this role will look closer to a software engineering role than a classic FDE role - most real-time customer contact is handled by the San Francisco team, and engagement is largely over Zoom and async rather than on-site.\nIn practice, the work looks like this:\nOwn the design, architecture, and delivery of tailored, production-grade solutions for complex, high-impact customer needs - often with no existing playbook\n\nSpot the problem two weeks before it becomes a blocker - a fragile pipeline, a missing quality check, a system that will not survive the next customer commitment - and make the case for what to build\n\nBuild the tools and internal systems the wider team knows it needs but has never had time to build\n\nOwn the tradeoff conversation: this is two engineering weeks, here is what it unlocks, here is what it costs, do we need it now? FDEs weigh engineering effort against business outcomes weekly, not once a quarter\n\nTurn one-off fixes into reusable infrastructure and repeatable deployment patterns, so the same problem does not need solving again for the next customer\n\nMake key architectural decisions around reliability, scalability, and security, and create the playbooks and documentation that let the team scale deployments efficiently\n\nMentor and uplevel other engineers through code reviews, architectural guidance, and the best practices you establish for forward-deployed work\n\nWe will also be straight with you about the pace. FDEs own deliverables that customers are waiting on, and the projects carry meaningful revenue, which means real ownership and real pressure. The work is demanding, and the tradeoff is scope: you will touch more systems, more customers, and make more decisions than a product role would. Several years of engineering growth compressed into one is no exaggeration.\nYou will work alongside staff-level engineers and, on some projects, directly with the founders. You will also be in rooms where spending and build-vs-buy decisions get made - conversations most engineers see a handful of times a year.\nDesired capabilities\nAt least 4+ years of professional software engineering experience\n\nStrong proficiency with ReactJS and TypeScript, with a high bar for code quality, usability, and accessibility\n\nDeep understanding of relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL), data modeling, and system design\n\nExperience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP), deployment pipelines, and production operations at scale\n\nA demonstrated ability to lead technical projects end-to-end in ambiguous environments with shifting requirements\n\nA track record of mentoring engineers and raising the bar on engineering practices within a team\n\nExcellent communication and stakeholder management - you communicate as you go, saying what you think the work is, where it gets complicated, and how long it will take, so course corrections happen early rather than after a week of heads-down work\n\nInnate curiosity: you ask the question everyone in the room was thinking, and you keep asking until you have the context needed to build the right thing\n\nYou use AI heavily and critically - as a tool you understand and can check, never a substitute for your own understanding of the problem\n\nYou create work rather than wait for it. If you prefer a manager handing you the next ticket, this is not the right role\n\nYou know when a problem is not an engineering problem, and you are willing to say so\n\nExtra credit\nExperience architecting and delivering production systems for LLMs or other AI-powered products in real-world, customer-facing environments\n\nBackground in building or contributing to component libraries, design systems, or reusable deployment frameworks\n\nProven experience with performance optimization and scaling of full-stack applications under real-world constraints and high-traffic conditions\n\nBenefits\nHighly competitive salary & equity\n\n25 paid days off\n\nAdditional health insurance\n\n610 EUR/ annual stipend for learning and development opportunities\n\nUp to 16 weeks of Paid Parental Leave for birthing and non-birthing parents","description_format":"text","description_chars":6573,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":4,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Health insurance","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Bulgaria","iso":"BG","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Job Boards & Aggregators","AI Training Data & Annotation","Professional Networks"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-14T13:20:06Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":44,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.796,"p_room":0.55,"age_days":52,"expected_fill_days":49,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-11-06T05:58:05Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":93168,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/handshake-senior-forward-deployed-engineer-bulgaria","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/handshake-senior-forward-deployed-engineer-bulgaria.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-06T16:41:39Z","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":31003,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-07T00:00:00Z"}},"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-forward-deployed-engineer-bulgaria"},{"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-forward-deployed-engineer-bulgaria"},{"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-forward-deployed-engineer-bulgaria"},{"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-forward-deployed-engineer-bulgaria\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fhandshake-senior-forward-deployed-engineer-bulgaria"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":905410}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"joinhandshake.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":905410},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}