Director Engineering, RLE

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…