Research Product Manager, Handshake
Handshake AI
$200-250k
Offers Equity
The career platform for Gen Z
Open for applications
The career platform for Gen Z
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$200-250k
Offers Equity
1001+ 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
- Product management or research leadership experience, ideally bridging research with engineering or infra
- Strong technical foundation in ML and LLMs, including post-training (fine-tuning, RLHF/RLAIF, evaluation frameworks)
- Experience contributing to research programs, benchmarks, or publications
- Proven ability to manage roadmaps, set priorities, and deliver impact
- Deep understanding of data quality and evaluation challenges in ML pipelines
- Skilled at building alignment across Research, Engineering, Ops, and Partnerships
- Excellent communicator with the ability to translate complex research into clear direction
- Systems thinker who thrives in ambiguous research domains and can structure them into measurable programs
What the job involves
- As Research PM, you’ll bridge Research, Engineering, and Operations—turning HAIR’s research agenda into scalable systems and partnerships
- You’ll align internal teams and external collaborators, helping define how the industry evaluates intelligence and setting new standards for AI research
- Define and execute the product roadmap across HAIR’s three pillars: Data Quality, Evaluation, and Data Value
- Build and maintain strategic relationships with AI labs, academic institutions, industry partners, and standards bodies
- Drive initiatives like interdisciplinary benchmarks, post-training data validation, and RLAIF expansion
- Collaborate with research scientists, engineers, and domain experts to ensure technical rigor
- Establish clear success metrics aligned with research OKRs and benchmarks
- Translate research strategy into execution across Eng, Ops, and Product
- Share HAIR’s outcomes internally and externally, including conferences and workshops
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 17M 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
- Health Insurance: Comprehensive medical , dental, and vision coverage
- Fertility and family forming: Through a partnership, Handshake offers comprehensive family benefits, including infertility treatments and a $15K stipend, to its employees.
- LGTBQ+ coverage: All medical plans cover transgender services.
- Mental health: Discounts on a variety of wellness apps and an Employee Assistance Program with access to five free counseling sessions.
- Tax savings: Tax-advantaged benefits to save money on healthcare, dependent care, and other expenses.
- Learning & development: Employees are provided with an annual stipend to use towards professional development, career development workshops, manager trainings, and 1-on-1 coaching through external partnerships
- Community leader support: Employee Resource Group leaders are compensated with a quarterly bonus for the high-impact work the role requires
- Parental leave: Leaves of 16 weeks for birth-giving parents and 10 weeks for non-birth-giving parents; the policy applies to adoptions as well. Handshake also partners to provide one-on-one coaching on preparing for leave and coming back from leave
- Flexible time off: No accrued time off or waiting period to take vacation. Two paid flexible holiday days off to observe holidays that closely align with religious, cultural, and personal needs
- Sabbatical: Paid six-week sabbatical to recharge and reset beginning at six years of continuous, full-time employment, and every four years thereafter
- Volunteer time off: Two days off for social and civil activism, volunteer work, and/or any related activities, including attending and participating in protests
- Life & disability insurance: Essential benefits and automatic coverage with basic life insurance, plus short-term and long-term disability coverage.
- 401k match: Dollar-for-dollar match up to 1% of pay, with a max of $1,200 per year.
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.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 10 more jobs at Handshake