Sales Development Representative, Data Partnerships

Handshake; Nashville (TN); On-site; USD 55,000 - 75,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity in a fast-growing company

401(k) match

Paid parental leave

Fertility benefits

Healthcare (medical, dental, vision)

Job summary

Handshake is building a direct-to-company data licensing motion for AI data products. You will identify potential data partners, reach out to executives, and drive real discovery to qualify fit before pricing.

Expect a fast-paced, high-volume environment with coaching to help you master end-to-end deal ownership. You’ll work with a team to reach weekly pipeline targets while refining the playbook, scripts, and target lists in a rapidly scaling AI company.

Qualifications

• 1–2 years of prospect or customer-facing, high-volume outbound sales experience.
• Genuinely comfortable with high-intensity, fast-moving environments.
• Coachable and able to adapt while maintaining curiosity on calls.
• Strong discovery skills: ask questions to understand needs before pitching.

Responsibilities

• Run high-volume outbound (calls, email, LinkedIn) to identify licensing-ready data opportunities.
• Move conversations past gatekeepers to owners/CTOs for real dialogues.
• Conduct thorough discovery to understand data, structure, and stakeholders before pricing.
• Handle objections with patience and build trust rather than pressure.
• Own the deal end-to-end from scoping to signature and payment.

Skills

Outbound sales experience

Prospecting

Discovery mindset

Resilience under pressure

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

Handshake already runs one of the largest AI-training-data operations in the market, working with frontier AI labs. We're standing up a new, adjacent motion: going directly to companies to license their proprietary data (workflow data, code, support transcripts, and more), clean it, rights-clear it, and get it into the hands of the labs building the next generation of AI. This is a zero-to-one build. You'd be one of the first 5-10 reps on the floor.

Companies are sitting on data that's genuinely valuable and they don't know it, or don't know who to trust with it. Your job is to find those companies, get the right person on the phone, and, through real discovery rather than a script, figure out whether there's a fit. When there is, you scope a deal, work it through to signature, and get them paid for something they already had.

This is a high-volume outbound motion, but the close isn't transactional the way your last quota might have been. You're not selling a subscription or an ad package; you're asking a business owner or their IT team to trust you with something sensitive. That's a different muscle, and we'll help you build it. But the volume expectations (the calls, the emails, the pipeline discipline) are exactly what you're used to.

• Run high-volume outbound (calls, email, LinkedIn) against a target account list to find companies with data worth licensing

• Get past the gatekeeper and onto a real conversation with an owner, founder, CTO, or Head of Data

• Run thorough discovery, not a five-minute qualifier. You need to actually understand what data a company has, how it's structured, who has the authority to sell it, and what would make them comfortable saying yes, before you ever talk price

• Handle real hesitation and real objections (competitive fears, security concerns, "why should I trust you with this") with patience, not pressure

• Own the deal end to end: scoping, looping in legal/security when needed, negotiating terms, and getting to signature

• Hit weekly activity and pipeline targets; this is still a numbers game, just not only a numbers game

• Help build the playbook as you go: scripts, target lists, and process will all be actively evolving in your first 90 days

If you've worked outbound at a high-velocity sales floor, you already have the muscle this role needs: activity discipline, resilience, comfort with rejection, full-cycle ownership. What's different here is the second half of the call. This isn't "get to yes fast." It's "understand exactly what they have and exactly what would make them comfortable, then earn a yes." The reps who succeed here are the ones who can slow down at the right moment, bringing real discovery and real listening, without losing the hustle that got them here in the first place.

Desired Capabilities

• 1-2 years of prospect or customer facing, high volume outbound sales experience: ideally your second sales role, somewhere with real activity metrics and a track record of quota attainment. A background at a comparable high-velocity outbound sales floor is a strong signal, not a requirement

• Genuinely comfortable with high-intensity, fast-moving environments. This is an early-stage build inside a fast-growing AI company; the hours and pace reflect that

• Coachable, not just hard-charging. You can take an "always be closing" instinct and adapt it into "always be understanding" when the moment calls for it

• A real discovery mindset: you ask more questions than you answer on a first call, and you're comfortable not pitching until you actually understand the situation

• Composure under a hard or awkward conversation. Asking a company to hand over its data is not a normal sales ask; the reps who win here can sit in that discomfort instead of rushing past it

• Process discipline: clean notes, real follow-through, nothing goes cold in your pipeline

• Comfortable with ambiguity: there's no fully-built playbook yet; you're helping write it

Extra Credit

• Experience selling into technical buyers (CTOs, Heads of Data/Eng)

• Background in data licensing, ad-tech data, enterprise SaaS, or API/platform sales

• Familiarity with data privacy or compliance basics (GDPR/CCPA); we'll train this either way

Perks

Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supported and thrive at work and in life.

The below benefits are for full-time US employees.

Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company

Financial Wellness: 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coaching

Family Support: Paid parental leave, fertility benefits, parental coaching

Wellbeing: Medical, dental, and vision, mental health support, $500 wellness stipend

Growth: $2,000 learning stipend, ongoing development

In Office Perks: Internet, commuting, and lunch stipend

Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days

Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses

Explore our mission, values, and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.