Senior Data Scientist, Handshake AI (SF)

Your Impact

Handshake is building the future of human data for AI.

We partner directly with top AI labs to power large language model (LLM) training and evaluation with high-quality, expert-generated data. As AI models become more sophisticated, the demand for specialized human input continues to grow—and Handshake is uniquely positioned to meet it. We power career platforms at 92% of the top U.S. universities, giving us direct access to verified expert talent across a wide range of domains.

Our AI team is rapidly building a new generation of human data products—from expert annotation platforms to AI interviewers and seamless payout infrastructure—all designed to accelerate research and improve model performance.

We’ve assembled a world-class team from YC, Notion, Scale, Palantir, and more, and we’re working directly with many of the world’s leading AI research labs. This is a unique opportunity to join a fast-growing team shaping the future of AI through better data, better tools, and better systems—for experts, by experts.

In your role as Data Scientist you will build dashboards and data pipelines to deepen our understanding of the fast growing Handshake AI business. You will deliver actionable insights and analyses that will guide the product strategy and operational next steps. You will be a thought partner for how to design our systems to cleanly track data. You will join a small team that will support all areas of the Handshake AI business, including Growth, Delivery Operations, Training, Churn/Retention, and more.

Your Role

• Define and track critical business and product metrics with product and engineering leaders

• Lead analytics workstreams to uncover trends and drive product and design innovation

• Collaborate strategically with product and engineering to ensure new systems and flows are designed in a way to capture data cleanly and effectively

• Quickly and efficiently build dashboards and reporting systems that meetings can be actually run out of to inform data-driven decision-making.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to understand analytical needs and translate them into clean, reusable data assets.

Your Experience

• 5+ years in data science, analytics, or a related quantitative field

• 4-year degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering

• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills for product / technical teams and executive audiences

• Advanced proficiency in SQL and Python / R

• Experience building dashboards to actually drive decision-making

• Familiarity with BI tools such as Looker and Hex

Note: This role is focused on data analytics and business strategy and is explicitly not about machine learning model development or causal inference.