Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, India

The role

You will own the end-to-end lifecycle of customer deployments for frontier AI labs. You will architect, build, and scale production systems to improve customer workflows and model performance.

What you will do

• Partner with frontier AI labs to translate technical challenges into scalable engineering solutions
• Partner with Engineering, Research, Product, and Operations teams in the US
• Design, build, and deploy production-grade applications
• Own technical architecture for customer deployments
• Prototype, test, and iterate on solutions based on customer feedback
• Build reusable tools, frameworks, and deployment patterns
• Mentor engineers through technical leadership and code reviews
• Help establish an engineering culture in the India engineering organization

Required qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Experience leading technically complex customer-facing, solutions engineering, or forward deployed engineering projects
• Strong proficiency with TypeScript, React, and modern backend architectures
• Deep understanding of relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL), system design, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure
• Experience building and operating production systems on AWS or GCP
• Strong technical judgment
• Ability to solve complex engineering problems in fast-moving, ambiguous environments
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills
• Experience collaborating effectively with globally distributed engineering teams, including teams based in the US

Nice to have

• Experience building AI-powered products, LLM infrastructure, or machine learning platforms
• Experience working directly with enterprise customers or strategic technical partners
• Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines
• Experience supporting applied AI or ML research teams
• Experience working in a fast-growing startup or high-growth engineering organization

Benefits

• 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

About the company

Handshake powers 25 million job seekers, 1 million+ employers, and 1,600 educational institutions. Handshake AI works directly with frontier AI lab researchers to create evaluations, publish benchmarks, and push the boundary of data.