Strategic Projects Lead, Coding

Handshake; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 156,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity in a fast-growing company

401(k) match and financial coaching

Parental leave and fertility benefits

Medical, dental, vision; mental health

Job summary

Handshake is building a leading AI data business and seeks a Strategic Projects Lead, Coding to drive multi-week to multi-month coding data initiatives. You will coordinate SWE Fellows, design evaluation workflows, and ensure delivery quality, margins, and customer relationships.

You’ll craft rubrics, run technical screens, and automate QA with Python/TypeScript/SQL, staying aligned with AI trends and data quality goals.

Qualifications

• 2+ years in technical or analytical roles; coding-focused background welcome.
• Technical degree in CS/Engineering/Data Science or hands-on coding experience.
• Strong coding skills and practical experience with unit tests, CI, and basic infra.

Responsibilities

• Lead multi-week to multi-month coding data initiatives for AI and platform teams.
• Coordinate hundreds to thousands of SWE Fellows and design evaluation workflows.
• Write and validate coding assessments and rubrics; ensure quality signals.
• Create scripts/infrastructure to automate QA and analytics; manage stakeholder relationships.
• Own delivery, margins, and customer interactions end-to-end.

Skills

2+ years experience

Coding skills

Communication skills

Entrepreneurial mindset

Fast learner

AI curiosity

Education

Computer Science degree

Engineering degree

Data Science degree

Tools

Python

TypeScript/Node

Java

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.

The Role

As a Strategic Projects Lead, Coding you’ll run multi-week to multi-month coding data initiatives for leading AI and platform teams. You’ll coordinate hundreds to thousands of highly skilled SWE Fellows, design and own technical evaluation and annotation workflows, and be accountable for delivery, margins, quality and customer relationships.

You’ll write and validate coding assessments, build rubric-driven code review processes, instrument quality signals, and quickly adapt workflows when systems and people need to flex to meet deadlines. This role bridges ML/product/engineering and operations — hands-on with code, fluent with metrics, and ruthless about data quality. What you’ll do:

• Multi-million ARR-equivalent program scope and delivery metrics.
• End-to-end delivery of coding-data programs : scoping → assessment design → Fellow selection → annotation → QA → customer feedback.
• Design and run technical screens (take-homes, unit-test driven tasks, live coding) that populate the SWE Talent Bench
• Create rubrics, audit processes and tooling to ensure code annotations/model labels meet production quality.
• Create scripts/infrastructure (Python/TypeScript/SQL) to automate QA, analytics and reporting.

You Have

• 2+ years of experience in technical or analytical roles such as software engineering, data, analytics, or technical product. We are also open to people who come out of non technical jobs that have a coding background or degree.
• A technical degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or similar and/or hands-on experience with coding (Python, SQL, or similar).
• Strong coding skills (Python, TypeScript/Node, Java or equivalent) and practical experience with unit tests, CI, version control, and basic infra.
• Strong analytical and data driven problem solver , with a first principles approach to scaling and operational challenges.
• Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills , able to work closely with technical teams and customers while juggling multiple high priority projects.
• Entrepreneurial, high ownership mindset , with a high degree of agency, comfort with ambiguity, and pride in end to end outcomes.
• Fast learner with deep curiosity about AI , able to quickly pick up complex and technical concepts and stay up to date on LLMs and AI trends.

You don’t need to be a full-time engineer in this role, but you should be technical enough to reason deeply about systems, data quality, and tradeoffs , and to earn credibility with technical stakeholders.

We Offer

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
• Remote & Office: Internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF office
• 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.

Compensation

$156K – $210K Offers Equity Offers Bonus

For cash compensation, we set standard ranges for all U.S.-based roles based on function, level, and geographic location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. In order to be compliant with local legislation, as well as to provide greater transparency to candidates, we share salary ranges on all job postings regardless of desired hiring location. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including geographic location as well as candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.