Handshake 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.
In 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.
Human 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.
We are building our India team to help accelerate the development of frontier models. This team is a critical, strategic investment for us - we have grown the team 3x in the past six months to help fuel our next phase of growth. India-based teammates will work hand-in-hand with US-based teams to scope, execute, and deliver critical human data projects to Frontier Labs and other customers.
As the Strategic Projects Lead you’ll run multi-week to multi-month coding data initiatives for leading AI and platform teams. You’ll coordinate hundreds to thousands of highly skilled SWE Fellows, design and own technical evaluation and annotation workflows, and be accountable for delivery, margins, quality and customer relationships.
You’ll write and validate coding assessments, build rubric-driven code review processes, instrument quality signals, and quickly adapt workflows when systems and people need to flex to meet deadlines. This role bridges ML/product/engineering and operations — hands-on with code, fluent with metrics, and ruthless about data quality. What you'll do:
You don’t need to be a full-time engineer in this role, but you should be technical enough to reason deeply about systems, data quality, and tradeoffs, and to earn credibility with technical stakeholders.
Handshake is the career platform for Gen Z. With a community of over 17 million students, alumni, employers, and career educators, Handshake’s network is where career advice and discovery turn into first, second, and third jobs.
Nearly 1 million companies use Handshake to build their future workforce—from Fortune 500 to federal agencies, school districts to startups, healthcare systems to small businesses.
Handshake is built for where you’re going, not where you’ve been.
