Senior Engineering Manager, Quality & Annotations
handshake · Remote
Experience: 7+ years
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 ~
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 ~
B 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.
## About the Role
We're hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to own two of HAI's core engineering teams, Quality and Annotations, leading a combined org of ~15 engineers. This role sits at a rare intersection: one team pushes the frontier of AI quality and evaluation tooling, while the other builds the extensible platform infrastructure that operators and fellows rely on every day.
• Lead quality engineering systems that directly improve AI output reliability, evaluation accuracy, and benchmark performance for frontier lab partners
• Own the annotations platform: operator workflows, tasking flows, and pipeline infrastructure that powers data delivery
• Build and scale an organization across two distinct technical domains, developing senior ICs and driving cross-team technical strategy
• Partner with internal stakeholders to prioritize platform investments that unlock other teams to move faster and build on top of shared infrastructure
Location: San Francisco, CA. This is an in-office role, 5 days/week (no remote/hybrid)
## You Have
Must-Haves:
• 7+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years managing engineering teams of 8 or more and experience manager managers.
• Background at companies where AI is the core product; you've shipped in environments where model quality, data pipelines, and evaluation rigor are table stakes
• Strong product engineering instincts; you can lead teams building complex user-facing systems, not just backend infrastructure
• Experience leading teams with meaningfully different technical focuses simultaneously
• Track record of developing engineers; you've grown senior ICs, EMs, and leads, not just delivered projects
• Strong prioritization and stakeholder management
• Clear, direct communicator who can translate between technical complexity and business context
What we’re looking for
• Engineering leader + builder: 3+ years managing teams, plus 5+ years hands-on engineering experience
• Strong people leadership: experience leading senior engineers; managing an EM (or equivalent scope) is a plus
• Execution in ambiguity: proven ability to align cross-functionally and deliver in fast-moving, unclear problem spaces
• Systems + product mindset: strong platform/distributed systems background, and the ability to turn needs into a clear roadmap, ship iteratively, and measure outcomes
Bonus Points:
• Familiarity with LLM evaluation, quality pipelines, or applied AI tooling
• Experience with annotation or data labeling platforms, tasking systems, or workflow orchestration
## We Offer
Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supported and thrive at work and in life.
The below benefits are for full-time US employees.
🎯 Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company
💰 Financial Wellness : 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coaching
🍼 Family Support: Paid parental leave, fertility benefits, parental coaching
💝 Wellbeing: Medical, dental, and vision, mental health support, $500 wellness stipend
📚 Growth:
,000 learning stipend, ongoing development
💻 Remote & Office: Internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF office
🏝 Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days
🤝 Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses
Explore our mission, values, and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers .
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.
## About the Role
We're hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to own two of HAI's core engineering teams, Quality and Annotations, leading a combined org of ~15 engineers. This role sits at a rare intersection: one team pushes the frontier of AI quality and evaluation tooling, while the other builds the extensible platform infrastructure that operators and fellows rely on every day.
• Lead quality engineering systems that directly improve AI output reliability, evaluation accuracy, and benchmark performance for frontier lab partners
• Own the annotations platform: operator workflows, tasking flows, and pipeline infrastructure that powers data delivery
• Build and scale an organization across two distinct technical domains, developing senior ICs and driving cross-team technical strategy
• Partner with internal stakeholders to prioritize platform investments that unlock other teams to move faster and build on top of shared infrastructure
Location: San Francisco, CA. This is an in-office role, 5 days/week (no remote/hybrid)
## You Have
Must-Haves:
• 7+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years managing engineering teams of 8 or more and experience manager managers.
• Background at companies where AI is the core product; you've shipped in environments where model quality, data pipelines, and evaluation rigor are table stakes
• Strong product engineering instincts; you can lead teams building complex user-facing systems, not just backend infrastructure
• Experience leading teams with meaningfully different technical focuses simultaneously
• Track record of developing engineers; you've grown senior ICs, EMs, and leads, not just delivered projects
• Strong prioritization and stakeholder management
• Clear, direct communicator who can translate between technical complexity and business context
What we’re looking for
• Engineering leader + builder: 3+ years managing teams, plus 5+ years hands-on engineering experience
• Strong people leadership: experience leading senior engineers; managing an EM (or equivalent scope) is a plus
• Execution in ambiguity: proven ability to align cross-functionally and deliver in fast-moving, unclear problem spaces
• Systems + product mindset: strong platform/distributed systems background, and the ability to turn needs into a clear roadmap, ship iteratively, and measure outcomes
Bonus Points:
• Familiarity with LLM evaluation, quality pipelines, or applied AI tooling
• Experience with annotation or data labeling platforms, tasking systems, or workflow orchestration
## We Offer
Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supported and thrive at work and in life.
The below benefits are for full-time US employees.
🎯 Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company
💰 Financial Wellness : 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coaching
🍼 Family Support: Paid parental leave, fertility benefits, parental coaching
💝 Wellbeing: Medical, dental, and vision, mental health support, $500 wellness stipend
📚 Growth:
Careeroza — One-stop Zone for Aspirants
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Public study materials
- Express.js — Web APIs & middleware (expressjs)
- Application setup · basic
- Routing deep dive · basic
- 1. MVC / Layered Architecture · medium
- Validation · medium
- File uploads · medium
- Sessions & auth (stateful) · medium
- Passport & strategies · medium
- Templating & SSR · medium
- WebSockets & SSE · medium
- Security middleware · advance
- Reverse proxies & trust · advance
- Performance · advance
- API design & versioning · advance
- Testing with Supertest · advance
- GraphQL & tRPC (overview) · advance
- Deployment checklist · advance
- Middlewares · basic
- Request & Response · basic
- AWS Crash Course (AWS)
- What is Cloud ? · basic
- What is AWS ? · basic
- If not cloud ? · basic
- Cloud Computing · basic
- AWS Pricing · basic
- AWS Shared Responsibility Model · basic
- AWS Management Console · basic
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- Policies · medium
- AWS Organizations · medium
- AWS Cognito · medium
- AWS Directory Service · medium
- AWS KMS (Key Management Service) · medium
- AWS Secrets Manager · medium
- AWS Shield · medium
- AWS WAF · medium
- AWS Inspector · medium
- AWS GuardDuty · medium
- EC2 · advance
- Launching EC2 Instances · advance
- EBS Volumes · advance
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- User Data Scripts · advance
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- Load Balancers · advance
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- NLB · advance
- Serverless Compute ,AWS Lambda, Lambda Layers · advance
- Event-Driven Architecture · advance
- ECS · advance
- EKS · advance
- Django (Django)
- What is Django · basic
- Installing Django · basic
- Features of Django · basic
- MVT Architecture · basic
- Django vs Flask · basic
- Creating Project & Creating App · basic
- Django Project Structure · basic
- URL Routing · basic
- Views · basic
- Templates · basic
- Static & Media Files · medium
- Models · medium
- ORM (Object Relational Mapping) · medium
- Model Relationships · medium
- Migrations · medium
- Django Admin · medium
- Forms · medium
- Authentication · medium
- Authorization · medium
- Middleware · medium
- Signals · medium
- Class Based Views Deep Dive · advance
- Generic Views · advance
- File Handling · advance
- Django REST Framework (DRF) · advance
- Advanced ORM · advance
- Caching · advance
- Asynchronous Django · advance
- Background Tasks · advance
- Interview Questions · interview-questions
- System Designing (System Designing)
- Day-1 : What is system Designing ? · basic
- Day-2 : Vertical vs. Horizontal Scaling · basic
- Day-3:How to do vertical scaling ? · basic
- Day4:How to do horizaontal scaling ? · basic
- Day:5TCP vs UDP · basic
- Day6:IP & DNS · basic
- Day7:Client-Server Model · basic
- Day8:HTTP & HTTPS · basic
- Databases (SQL vs NoSQL) · medium
- Caching · medium
- Day9:Latency & Throughput · basic
- Load Balancing · medium
- Indexes & Query Optimization · medium
- CDN · medium
- Proxies · medium
- Message Queues · medium
- Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling · medium
- Database Replication · advance
- Database Sharding · advance
- Consistent Hashing · advance
- CAP Theorem · advance
- Rate Limiting · advance
- Service Discovery · advance
- Event-Driven Architecture · advance
- API Gateway · advance
- Distributed Consensus · expert
- Microservices · expert
- Observability · expert
- Idempotency · expert
- PACELC Theorem · expert
- Two-Phase Commit · expert
- Back-of-Envelope Estimation · expert
- Designing for Failure · expert
- Node.js — Server-side JavaScript (nodejs)
- Getting started · basic
- JavaScript on the server · basic
- CommonJS modules · basic
- ES modules (ESM) · basic
- npm & package management · basic
- Asynchronous JavaScript in Node · basic
- The event loop · basic
- Essential core utilities · basic
- process & configuration · basic
- File system basics · basic
- HTTP & HTTPS servers · medium
- Streams · medium
- Events & EventEmitter · medium
- Advanced filesystem · medium
- crypto · medium
- Compression & encoding · medium
- Child processes · medium
- net, dgram & DNS · medium
- readline, timers & scheduling · medium
- Testing & diagnostics (intro) · medium
- Worker threads · advance
- cluster & multi-process scaling · advance
- Performance & tuning · advance
- Debugging & observability · advance
- Security hardening · advance
- Native addons & N-API · advance
- Architecture patterns · advance
- Graceful shutdown · advance
- 100 Questions · interview questions
- Python (Python)
- Python Fundamentals · basic
- Control Flow · basic
- Strings · basic
- Collections / Data Structures · basic
- Functions · basic
- Modules and Packages · basic
- File Handling · basic
- Exception Handling · basic
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP · medium
- Advanced Python Concepts · advance
- Functional Programming · advance
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- Async Programming · advance
- JavaScript (JavaScript)
- JS Introduction · basic
- Variables & Data Types · basic
- Operators · basic
- Control Flow · basic
- Functions · basic
- Scope & Execution · basic
- Closures · basic
- Objects · basic
- Arrays · basic
- Strings · basic
- DOM Manipulation · basic
- Browser APIs · medium
- Asynchronous JavaScript · medium
- Fetch & APIs · medium
- ES6+ Features · medium
- OOP in JavaScript · medium
- Prototype & Inheritance · advance
- Advanced Functions · advance
- Memory Management · advance
- Error Handling · advance
- Modules · advance
- Advanced Async Concepts · advance
- Functional Programming · advance
- JavaScript Internals · advance
- Performance Optimization · advance
- MongoDB — Documents & data modeling (MongoDB)
- Introduction · basic
- Shell, Compass & tools · basic
- Databases & collections · basic
- CRUD operations · basic
- Indexes deep dive · medium
- Explain plans & performance · medium
- Aggregation framework · medium
- Schema design patterns · medium
- Mongoose basics · medium
- Mongoose advanced · medium
- Drivers & connection · medium
- Operators for updates & arrays · medium
- Replication & read preferences · advance
- Write concern & read concern · advance
- Multi-document transactions · advance
- Change streams · advance
- Sharding (overview) · advance
- Atlas Search & full-text · advance
- GridFS & large files · advance
- Backup, restore & ops · advance
- SQL (SQL)
- SQL Fundamentals · basic
- Database Operations · basic
- Table Operations · basic
- CRUD Operations · basic
- Filtering & Operators · basic
- SQL Functions · basic
- GROUPING Data · basic
- Joins · medium
- Constraints · basic
- Subqueries · medium
- Set Operators · medium
- Views · medium
- Indexes · medium
- Normalization · advance
- Transactions · advance
- Stored Procedures & Functions · advance
- Triggers · advance
- Advanced SQL · advance
- Query Optimization · advance
- Database Design · advance
- SQL Security · advance
- Backup & Recovery · advance
- Questions · interview questions
- System Architecture (System Architecture)
- Fundamentals of System Architecture · basic
- Distributed System Basics · basic
- System Reliability Concepts · basic
- Scaling Concepts · basic
- Networking Basics · basic
- Web Communication · basic
- API Communication · basic
- Proxy & Delivery Systems · basic
- Web Architecture Basics · basic
- Rendering Architectures · basic
- Frontend Advanced Concepts · basic
- Message Queue Basics · medium
- What is Load Balancer · medium
- Load Balancing Algorithms · medium
- API Design Basics · medium
- API Protection · medium
- Authentication Basics · medium
- Security Tokens · medium
- Security Threats · medium
- Encryption & Security · medium
- SQL Database Basics · medium
- SQL Scaling Concepts · medium
- NoSQL Databases · medium
- Database Optimization · medium
- Replication Strategies · medium
- Caching Basics · medium
- Cache Storage Systems · medium
- Cache Strategies · medium
- Event-Driven Systems · advance
- Queue Reliability · advance
- Microservices Basics · advance
- Microservice Communication · advance
- Distributed Transactions · advance
- DevOps Basics · advance
- Automation Tools · advance
- Deployment Strategies · advance
- Monitoring Basics · advance
- Monitoring Tools · advance
- Distributed System Concepts · advance
- Distributed Algorithms · advance
- Angular (Angular)
- Angular Fundamentals · basic
- Project Structure · basic
- Components & Templates · basic
- Data Binding · basic
- Directives · basic
- Pipes · basic
- Component Communication · basic
- Lifecycle Hooks · basic
- Routing Basics · basic
- Routing · basic
- API Calls · basic
- Forms · medium
- Routing · medium
- Services & Dependency Injection · medium
- RxJS & Observables · medium
- Authentication & Security · medium
- Component Interaction · medium
- State Management Basics · medium
- Error Handiling · medium
- Perfomance Basic · medium
- Real World Features · medium
- Advanced Angular Architecture · advance
- Change Detection · advance
- Advanced RxJS · advance
- State Management · advance
- Dynamic Rendering · advance
- Perfomance Optimization · advance
- Modern Angular · advance
- STAR (Situation, Task, Action, and Result) (Situation Based Questions)
💻 Remote & Office: Internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF office
🏝 Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days
🤝 Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses
Explore our mission, values, and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers .