Member of Technical Staff, Coding Agents at Handshake, New York

Neolife Updates; New York (NY); On-site; USD 270,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Handshake, based in New York, NY, is hiring a Member of Technical Staff, Coding Agents. You will help define benchmarks and evaluation data for frontier coding agents, partnering with top AI researchers and thousands of engineers to push the field forward.

You will publish benchmarks, shape the trajectory of the coding-agent landscape, and contribute open-source tools and research papers. This is a high-ownership role with influence on technical direction and open science in AI for software.

Qualifications

• Experience publishing benchmarks for AI/ML systems.
• Strong track record of OSS contributions and public code.
• Experience with evaluating AI systems and software agents.

Responsibilities

• Publish coding benchmarks that challenge state-of-the-art frontier agents.
• Shape understanding of where the coding-agent landscape is headed via public studies.
• Collaborate with leading AI labs to improve coding models.
• Contribute openly through benchmarks, open-source tools, research, and technical writing.

Skills

Coding benchmarks

Open-source contributions

Agent harnesses

Tools

GitHub

Job description

Handshake is on a mission to organize expert human knowledge to advance the AI economy — and the company is hiring a Member of Technical Staff, Coding Agents to help define how frontier coding agents are benchmarked and improved. Based in New York, NY, this full-time role sits at the intersection of AI research and software engineering, with compensation ranging from USD 270,000 to 350,000 per year.

Handshake AI works directly with frontier labs on their most consequential data, evaluation, and post-training challenges. The team includes veterans from Scale AI, Meta, Google, Amazon, xAI, Notion, and Palantir. As a Member of Technical Staff, you will help build the systems that turn expert human knowledge into the data and evaluations that make frontier models better.

What the Role Involves

This is a broad, high-ownership position designed for researchers who build. Rather than simply running experiments, you will partner with top AI researchers and thousands of software engineers to develop new benchmarks, reward and verifier systems, agent-evaluation methodologies, and data-quality techniques centered on AI for coding.

The core questions you will confront include what should be measured, how to design evaluations that reflect real capability, how to create high-signal feedback, and how to build the environments and data systems that make those answers actionable.

Early team members hold unusual influence over technical direction, operating culture, and the open-source software, benchmarks, and research products the company ships. Handshake values demonstrated research capability, technical judgment, and a builder's mindset far more than any specific title, degree, or career path.

Key Responsibilities

• Publish coding benchmarks that challenge state-of-the-art frontier agents.
• Shape understanding of where the coding-agent landscape is headed, sharing impactful findings through public studies.
• Collaborate with leading AI labs to improve their coding models.
• Contribute openly through benchmarks, open-source tools, research, and technical writing.

What Handshake Is Looking For

• Passion for building software with agents and regular experimentation with the latest coding-agent tools.
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment with substantial ownership.
• At least one of the following: prior work on a coding benchmark; published research at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, or COLM on AI for software or code generation; or extensive software engineering experience with a strong GitHub profile of OSS contributions and deep knowledge of agent harnesses.

Why Join Handshake

• Work at the very frontier of AI with most major AI labs, researching some of the most important problems in data and evaluations.
• Publish results and work in public through open-source benchmarks and software, papers, and blogs.
• Join a rapidly growing company whose data business grew from zero to nearly $1B run rate in a year.
• Help build an early technical organization where your work shapes the roadmap, standards, and culture.
• Attend and publish at conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, and COLM.

Application Tips for Aspiring Candidates

To stand out, focus on demonstrating tangible proof of your builder's mindset. A portfolio showcasing open-source contributions to agent harnesses or benchmark repositories will carry significant weight. Engage with platforms like Hugging Face and arXiv to stay current on evaluation methodologies, and be prepared to discuss specific coding agents you have recently tinkered with.

Highlight any publications or technical writing that illustrate your ability to communicate complex findings clearly. Familiarity with the broader research community — especially work presented at machine learning conferences — will signal that you understand the frontier landscape.

The posting went live on October 10, 2026, and applications close on December 10, 2026. If you are ready to help build the evaluation infrastructure for the next generation of AI, this is your opportunity.