Director Engineering, RLE

Job description

ABOUT HANDSHAKE 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. WHY JOIN HANDSHAKE NOW: - Shape how every career evolves in the AI economy, at global scale, with impact your friends, family and peers can see and feel - Partner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world's top educational institutions - Work together with engineers, scientists, operators, and more from Palantir, Meta, Scale AI, and former YC founders - Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue ABOUT HANDSHAKE AI 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. As we continue to invest in our engineering organization in India, we're building a high-performing team that partners closely with our US engineering teams to develop the platforms powering the next generation of AI. DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING, INDIA ABOUT THE ROLE We're hiring a Director of Engineering to build and scale Handshake AI's engineering organization in India. This is a rare opportunity to build an engineering organization from the ground up. You'll partner closely with engineering leadership in the US to hire exceptional engineers, establish our engineering culture, and grow India into a core extension of Handshake AI Engineering. You'll begin by building our first engineering teams across Reinforcement Learning Environments (RLE), Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE), International Expansion, and other strategic initiatives. As the organization grows, you'll help shape the technical direction, operating model, and culture of the India engineering organization while ensuring our teams operate as one engineering organization alongside our US teams. We're looking for a builder who thrives in zero-to-one environments, moves quickly through ambiguity, attracts exceptional talent, and raises the bar everywhere they go. This role requires someone who combines strong technical judgment with relentless execution, builds trust quickly, and is passionate about building high-performing engineering teams from the ground up. Location: Bengaluru, India. This is an in-office role. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Build Handshake AI's engineering organization in India by hiring, developing, and leading exceptional engineers - Partner closely with Engineering, Research, Product, and Operations leaders in the US to execute against a shared roadmap and build one globally integrated engineering organization - Scale engineering teams across Reinforcement Learning Environments (RLE), Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE), International Expansion, and future strategic initiatives - Create a culture of ownership, urgency, technical excellence, and high accountability that attracts and retains top engineering talent - Drive engineering execution across multiple teams while maintaining a high bar for quality, reliability, and long-term maintainability - Help define the technical direction, engineering practices, and operating model for the India engineering organization - Coach and develop engineers while raising the bar for technical excellence and execution - Serve as a trusted partner to engineering leadership while helping shape the long-term vision for Handshake AI Engineering WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Founding builder: Experience building engineering teams or organizations from the ground up. You thrive in zero-to-one environments and know how to create structure, attract exceptional talent, and scale teams without sacrificing speed or quality. - Exceptional people leader: Proven success hiring, developing, and retaining high-performing engineering teams. You have a high talent bar and know how to build teams that other exceptional engineers want to join. - Strong technical foundation: Experience leading organizations building distributed systems, platform infrastructure, AI platforms, or large-scale software products. - Experience partnering with US engineering teams: Proven success working closely with US-based engineering organizations or globally distributed teams. You know how to build trust, establish strong operating rhythms, and execute effectively across time zones. - Execution through ambiguity: You create clarity, make decisions quickly, and consistently deliver results in fast-moving, evolving environments. - Influence and communication: Outstanding ability to align stakeholders, inspire teams, and build trust across Engineering, Product, Research, and Operations. - Ownership mentality: You set ambitious goals, hold yourself and your teams accountable, and lead by example. - Growth mindset: You're excited to stay technically engaged while building an engineering organization that can scale for years to come. NICE TO HAVE - Experience with reinforcement learning infrastructure, simulation systems, or AI evaluation platforms - Experience supporting applied AI or machine learning research teams - Experience building customer-facing platforms, developer platforms, or large-scale distributed systems - Familiarity with AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, APIs, and modern engineering stacks - Experience working in a fast-growing startup or hypergrowth environment WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE - Build a world-class engineering organization in India that becomes a core extension of Handshake AI Engineering - India engineering teams operate seamlessly alongside our US engineering teams with strong technical execution and collaboration - Engineering teams consistently deliver high-quality platforms and products that accelerate Handshake AI's growth - The India engineering organization develops a strong culture of ownership, speed, technical excellence, and continuous improvement - Handshake AI continues to attract and retain exceptional engineering talent in India - The platforms built by the India engineering organization measurably improve the capabilities, reliability, and scalability of Handshake AI PERKS - 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