AI Researcher, Handshake
Handshake AI
$180-300k
+ Equity
College career network and job board
Open for applications
College career network and job board
501-1000 employees
Open for applications
$180-300k
+ Equity
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To democratize access to opportunity and ensure any student can build a great career no matter who they know, where they live or what school they attend.
Role
Who you are
- AI/ML Research Depth: You’ve conducted meaningful research—whether in academia or industry—and can speak fluently about LLMs, agent-based systems, and emerging evaluation methods. You’ve likely published at top venues or shipped work that mattered in production
- Strategic, Customer-Obsessed Mindset: You know how to talk to technical buyers and senior researchers, uncover their real pain points, and turn that into action. You’re not afraid of a blank whiteboard and thrive in messy, fast-moving environments
- Builder’s DNA: You move quickly, prototype often, and aren’t precious about titles or playbooks. You’re comfortable sitting between research, product, and GTM—and know how to ship
- Technical Fluency: You’re comfortable debugging models, evaluating outputs, and collaborating with engineers. You’ve likely worked with frameworks like PyTorch or JAX, and you understand how modern ML stacks fit together
What the job involves
- We’re looking for an entrepreneurial AI Researcher to help us build at the frontier
- As an AI Researcher, you’ll work directly with the world’s leading labs to scope novel data and evaluation challenges, spin up ambitious new initiatives, and turn our unmatched access to PhD talent into differentiated capabilities
- You’ll operate with autonomy and urgency, shaping our roadmap through direct customer insight and setting the foundation for a world-class research function within Handshake
- Be the Lab’s First Call: You’ll be a point of contact for researchers at the most advanced AI labs. By building deep, trust-based relationships, you’ll stay ahead of their emerging needs—so when a new challenge arises, we’re already in the room
- Scope and Launch New Research-Driven Initiatives: You’ll partner directly with labs to uncover unarticulated data and evaluation needs—across reasoning, multi-agent systems, tool use, and beyond. Then you’ll help shape these ideas into concrete, scoped projects we can execute on
- Prototype and Bring New Offerings to Market: You’ll lead the 0→1 work of designing new data types, spinning up lightweight pilots with engineering and ops, and collaborating with business teams to turn promising experiments into scalable offerings
Our take
The three founders of Handshake established their company in an attempt to eliminate inequality and make the student hiring landscape fairer. The Handshake platform acts as a LinkedIn for college students, pairing students from every walk of life with more than 650K employers, including the entire Fortune 500, which includes Google and Nike.
The graduate recruitment platform is open to any student with a valid @.edu email address, with more than 12 million active users from thousands of colleges and universities. With a student-first philosophy, the company generates revenue from both universities and employers rather than students.
Valued at $3.5B, Handshake has gained traction in a competitive market, although it has strong competition from recruiting giants LinkedIn and Indeed. It stands out, however, by helping students build new relationships and skills, rather than simply making connections to people they already know.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
2% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Jan 2022
$200m
SERIES F
May 2021
$80m
SERIES E
Total funding: $434m
Company benefits
- đź’°Equity and ownership in a fast-growing company
- 🍼16 Weeks of paid parental leave for birth giving parents & 10 weeks of paid parental leave for non-birth giving parents
- đź’ťComprehensive medical, dental, and vision policies including LGTBQ+ Coverage. We also provide resources for Mental Health Assistance, Employee Assistance Programs and counseling support
- đź’»Handshake offers $500/ÂŁ360 home office stipend for you to spend during your first 3 months to create a productive and comfortable workspace at home
- đź“šGenerous learning & development opportunities and an annual $2,000/ÂŁ1,500 stipend for you to grow your skills and career
- 🏦401k Match: Handshake offers a dollar-for-dollar match on 1% of deferred salary, up to a maximum of $1,200 per year
- 🏝 All full-time US-based Handshakers are eligible for our flexible time off policy to get out and see the world. In addition, we offer 8 standardized holidays, and 2 additional days of flexible holiday time off. Lastly, we have a Summer and Winter #ShakeBreak, two one-week periods of Collective Time Off
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Garrett Lord
(Co-Founder & CEO)Majored in Computer Science at Michigan Technological University. Interned at Palantir Technologies before co-founding Handshake in 2012.
Ben Christensen
(Co-Founder)Graduated from Michigan Technological University with a degree in Computer Networking & Systems Administration. Interned at Target and worked as a Developer at Up and Running Software. Was part of Arbor Networks' ASERT Security Research team.
Scott Ringwelski
(Co-Founder)Attained a degree in Computer Software Engineering from Michigan Technological University. Co-founded Handshake in 2012.
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