Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (Bulgaria)

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.

Location: Sofia, Bulgaria. This role is based out of our Sofia office and is not eligible for full-time remote work. We are growing our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team in Sofia, which today consists of six engineers and works alongside a team of 20+ engineers in San Francisco. Forward Deployed Engineering is a title we apply to software engineers who work much closer to the customer than a typical product engineer. At the root of the role is a strong software engineer — someone who understands technical systems, can hold the bigger picture, and can go deep into the weeds when a system breaks. What differs is the scope. You find the problem, decide whether it is even an engineering problem, scope the solution, and then either build it yourself or write the tickets and consult while a product team builds it. As a senior member of the team, your judgment shapes how we approach our most critical partnerships, and you will set the standard for how forward-deployed work gets done from Sofia. Because of the time zone, this role will look closer to a software engineering role than a classic FDE role — most real-time customer contact is handled by the San Francisco team, and engagement is largely over Zoom and async rather than on-site. In practice, the work looks like this: Own the design, architecture, and delivery of tailored, production-grade solutions for complex, high-impact customer needs — often with no existing playbook Spot the problem two weeks before it becomes a blocker — a fragile pipeline, a missing quality check, a system that will not survive the next customer commitment — and make the case for what to build Build the tools and internal systems the wider team knows it needs but has never had time to build Own the tradeoff conversation: this is two engineering weeks, here is what it unlocks, here is what it costs, do we need it now? FDEs weigh engineering effort against business outcomes weekly, not once a quarter Turn one-off fixes into reusable infrastructure and repeatable deployment patterns, so the same problem does not need solving again for the next customer Make key architectural decisions around reliability, scalability, and security, and create the playbooks and documentation that let the team scale deployments efficiently Mentor and uplevel other engineers through code reviews, architectural guidance, and the best practices you establish for forward-deployed work We will also be straight with you about the pace. FDEs own deliverables that customers