Workplace Experience Coordinator, India (Contract)

Handshake; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 1,000,000 - 1,600,000; Full time

Job summary

Handshake in Bengaluru is seeking a Workplace Experience Manager to run our Bangalore office. You will own daily operations, from food program to vendor relationships, ensuring a welcoming first impression for new hires and visitors.

This in-office contract role requires building the function from scratch, negotiating with vendors, piloting ideas, collecting feedback, and shaping the office culture for a fast-growing startup.

Qualifications

• Prior experience in office operations or workplace experience.
• Hands-on vendor management and negotiation skills.
• Budget tracking and cost control abilities.

Responsibilities

• Manage vendor relationships for meals, snacks, and office services.
• Oversee food program planning, ordering, and setup.
• Lead onboarding and cultural initiatives for Bangalore team.

Skills

Office operations

Vendor management

Budget tracking

Communication

Organization

Kannada / Hindi

Startup experience

Team liaison

Tools

Google Sheets

Job description

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.

About the Role

We're hiring a Workplace Experience Manager to run our Bangalore office. You'll own how the office works every day: the food, the vendors behind it, the space, and what it feels like to walk in on your first day.

A lot of this doesn't exist yet, so you'll build it. You'll find and negotiate with vendors, test new ideas through small pilots, listen to what the team tells you, and keep improving. You'll also be one of the first people every new hire and visitor meets, which makes you their first impression of Handshake in Bangalore. We want someone who treats setting the culture as a core part of the job.

This is a contract, in-office role that requires five days a week onsite.

What You'll Do

Vendor Management

• Source and onboard vendors for meals, snacks, beverages, merch, transport, office supplies, etc
• Compare at least three quotes, check licensing and references, and run tastings before we sign anyone
• Negotiate pricing, minimum orders, payment terms, and service levels, and get them in writing
• Be the single point of contact for every vendor: resolve missed deliveries and quality issues quickly, and keep backup options ready for critical services
• Review each vendor monthly on quality, reliability, and cost, and renegotiate or replace the ones that slip
• Own the snack, meal, and supply budget: track spend weekly, flag overruns early, and bring a recommendation for fixing them

Food Program

• Plan weekly lunch and dinner menus that work for the whole team, including specific dietary needs (we just have vegetarian, non vegetarian, lactose intolerant now but this list might grow)
• Confirm headcounts, coordinate orders, and make sure food arrives on time and is set up well
• Keep the pantry stocked and rotate snacks based on what gets eaten and what gets left behind

Pilots and Feedback

• Test new ideas as short pilots before committing budget, whether that's a new caterer, a snack subscription, or a weekly team ritual
• Define success before each pilot starts (participation, cost per person, satisfaction score), run it for two to four weeks, then decide whether to scale it, change it, or stop it
• Collect feedback continuously through pulse surveys, Slack polls, and conversations over lunch
• Share a short monthly update on what you heard, what you changed, and what you're testing next
• Keep a simple log of every experiment and its results, so anyone can see what was tried and why it was kept or dropped

Onboarding and Culture

• Own the in-office side of onboarding: desk and equipment ready before day one, an office tour, an introduction to the neighborhood, and a check-in at the end of week one
• Set the tone for every new hire and visitor: how you welcome people shapes how they see Handshake
• Plan and run low-cost, high-impact monthly team bonding activities, plus small weekly rituals that bring people together
• Build traditions for the Bangalore team, from festival celebrations to marking launches, milestones, and new joiners

Office Operations

• Keep the office clean, organized, and well-stocked: manage stationery and supply inventory, set reorder levels, and work with housekeeping and building management to resolve issues fast
• Generate guest passes, greet visitors on arrival, and share helpful information about the office and surrounding area
• Be the go-to person for office requests, from a broken chair to a last‑minute meeting setup
• Optional but a big plus: book flights and accommodation for employees traveling between the India and US offices

What Success Looks Like

• First 30 days: audit current vendors, spend, and supplies, get to know the team, and ship quick fixes from the first round of feedback
• By 60 days: run at least one vendor pilot and one culture pilot end to end, and share the results
• By 90 days: a stable vendor roster with agreed rates and service levels, a meal program that runs without daily escalations, and a monthly feedback cycle the team trusts

Desired Capabilities

• Prior experience in office operations, workplace experience, administration, hospitality, or a similar role
• Hands‑on vendor management: you've sourced vendors, negotiated rates and terms, and held them to agreed service levels
• Comfortable with numbers: you can build a budget tracker in Google Sheets, compare quotes side by side, and explain where the money goes
• An experimenter's mindset: you test small, ask for feedback, and change course based on what you learn
• Strong organizational skills with excellent attention to detail
• A warm, confident communicator who can welcome a visitor and hold firm in a vendor negotiation on the same day
• Ownership: you notice what needs fixing and fix it without being asked
• Comfortable working in a fast‑paced, in‑person environment and managing multiple priorities at once

Extra Credit

• Experience supporting employee travel bookings
• Event planning or team engagement experience, especially on a tight budget
• Previous experience in a startup or fast‑growing environment
• Experience setting up an office or food program from scratch
• Kannada or Hindi, for working with local vendors