Senior Engineering Manager, Quality & Annotations

About the role

Handshake AI is scaling rapidly to provide the data infrastructure necessary for frontier AI development. We are seeking a leader to manage our Quality and Annotations teams, overseeing approximately 15 engineers as they build evaluation tools and data pipeline platforms.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Direct the development of quality engineering systems to enhance AI output reliability and evaluation accuracy for lab partners.
• Manage the annotations platform, including tasking flows, operator workflows, and pipeline infrastructure.
• Scale an organization across two technical domains while mentoring senior individual contributors and engineering managers.
• Align cross-functional stakeholders to prioritize platform investments and technical strategy.

Requirements

• 7+ years of total engineering experience, with at least 3+ years managing teams of 8 or more people.
• Experience managing other engineering managers.
• Professional background at companies where AI is the primary product, specifically involving model quality, evaluation rigor, and data pipelines.
• Proven ability to lead teams building complex user-facing systems alongside backend infrastructure.
• Demonstrated success in developing senior engineers and engineering leads.
• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous environments and translate technical complexity into business outcomes.

Nice to have

• Prior work with LLM evaluation, applied AI tooling, or quality pipelines.
• Experience building or maintaining data labeling platforms, workflow orchestration, or tasking systems.

Skills & tools

• Engineering management and organizational design
• Distributed systems and platform architecture
• Product engineering and roadmap development
• Stakeholder management and cross-functional communication

Practical notes

• This is a full-time, in-office position located in San Francisco.
• Benefits include 401(k) matching, medical, dental, and vision insurance, mental health support, a $500 wellness stipend, and a $2,000 learning stipend.
• Additional perks include paid parental leave, fertility benefits, flexible PTO, 15 holidays, 2 flex days, and daily office amenities such as lunch and gym access.