Strategic Projects Lead, Coding

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.

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.

The Role

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:

• Multi-million ARR-equivalent program scope and delivery metrics.
• End-to-end delivery of coding-data programs: scoping → assessment design → Fellow selection → annotation → QA → customer feedback.
• Design and run technical screens (take-homes, unit-test driven tasks, live coding) that populate the SWE Talent Bench
• Create rubrics, audit processes and tooling to ensure code annotations/model labels meet production quality.
• Create scripts/infrastructure (Python/TypeScript/SQL) to automate QA, analytics and reporting.

You Have

• 4+ years of experience in technical or analytical roles such as software engineering, data, analytics, or technical product.
• A technical degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or similar and/or hands-on experience with coding (Python, SQL, or similar).
• Strong coding skills (Python, TypeScript/Node, Java or equivalent) and practical experience with unit tests, CI, version control, and basic infra.
• Strong analytical and data driven problem solver, with a first principles approach to scaling and operational challenges.
• Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills, able to work closely with technical teams and customers while juggling multiple high priority projects.
• Entrepreneurial, high ownership mindset, with a high degree of agency, comfort with ambiguity, and pride in end to end outcomes.
• Fast learner with deep curiosity about AI, able to quickly pick up complex and technical concepts and stay up to date on LLMs and AI trends.

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.

Desired Capabilities

• Technical background (CS degree or proficiency in SQL/Python for analytics).
• Experience in AI, ML, or data operations, particularly in workforce management, data labeling, or model evaluation.
• Previous experience in a high-growth startup or an AI-focused company.

You’ll Thrive Here If You

• Are motivated by solving operational problems that have direct, measurable impact.
• Want to be part of a company shaping the future of AI through human data.
• Can navigate ambiguity, act with urgency, and keep multiple workstreams moving in parallel.
• Are ambitious and looking for a stepping stone into leadership roles in operations or client strategy

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.