Director of Applied Machine Learning

Join Handshake as the Director of Applied Machine Learning, where you'll lead the function that bridges frontier AI research and enterprise-scale delivery. You'll manage a team of AI Engineers, Research Scientists, and AI Forward Deployed Engineers, and partner directly with AI lab researchers and internal stakeholders. This role offers a unique opportunity to shape the future of generative AI and make a significant impact in the field.

• Lead the function that sits at the intersection of frontier AI research and enterprise-scale delivery, focusing on post-training and RL environments.
• Build and grow a team, set the technical standards for how the team engages with frontier labs, and help shape the roadmap as we scale.
• Own strategic project support across lab engagements, leading your team through a dynamic, evolving roadmap rather than executing the work solo.
• Strong cross-functional leadership, comfortable working across engineering and operations, and managing shifting timelines with a team in tow
• Excellent client-facing communication skills — you can translate technical work into business impact and hold your own with both researchers and customers
• Experience building and scaling teams or infrastructure in an applied, production environment
• Organizational maturity and comfort with ambiguity — you'll need to be creative in solving problems as they arrive
• Technical depth in applied AI systems design and model post-training (GRPO/PPO, SFT, or similar) enough to support a research-leaning team, though you don't need to have trained frontier models yourself
• Experience leading and growing technical teams, ideally with a research background in applied ML or AI
• Familiarity with evaluation frameworks, annotation tooling, or human feedback collection at scale
• Experience managing managers or scaling a team through multiple growth stages
• Prior lab experience deploying or training agents for applied, real-world use cases