Member of Technical Staff, Post-Training (India)

HandshakeIndiaHAI Research

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Opens the official Handshake careers page

Salary

Not listed

Job type

Full-time

Experience

Mid · 3+ yrs

Posted

9 Oct 2026

Status

Open · checked 7d ago

About this role

Handshake is hiring a Member of Technical Staff for Post-Training in India to help shape a new technical organization focusing on advanced machine learning systems. This position suits builders and researchers with a strong background in model evaluation and fine-tuning who want to influence foundational AI infrastructure.

Role Overview

Handshake seeks a Member of Technical Staff to design and build post-training systems and external AI products. The professional in this position will work alongside domain experts, researchers, and customers to translate ambiguous requirements into experiments, data pipelines, and evaluation frameworks. Early team members gain significant influence over the company's technical direction and operating culture.

Key Responsibilities

Design post-training methodologies for frontier models, covering supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, preference optimization, and reward modeling.

Translate open-ended research needs into hypotheses, experiments, evaluation plans, and production-quality implementations.

Build and improve training environments, benchmarks, data-processing pipelines, and quality-control systems.

Run iterative loops by prototyping, evaluating performance, interpreting results, and building subsequent systems.

Collaborate with AI researchers and domain experts to develop high-signal data and feedback methods.

Productize repeatable patterns into reusable software and platforms.

Maintain high engineering standards through design judgment, code quality, communication, and mentorship.

Contribute to the field through technical writing, research, open-source tools, and benchmarks.

Requirements

Three or more years of demonstrated strength in model-evaluation, fine-tuning, or post-training work.

Proficiency in Python with the ability to write scalable and efficient software.

Practical experience using modern machine learning tooling, particularly PyTorch and large-scale data or evaluation workflows.

Sound experimental judgment to form hypotheses, select metrics, and diagnose failures.

Experience designing complete systems and making tradeoffs regarding scale, quality, reliability, and reuse.

Comfort operating with high ownership in an ambiguous and fast-paced environment.

Collaborative communication skills suited for working with diverse teams and customers.

Nice to Have

Experience building or operating large-scale machine learning training, inference, or data systems.

Background in developing agent benchmarks, evaluation methodologies, annotation systems, or data-quality frameworks.

Applied work or research in alignment, reinforcement learning, synthetic data, model behavior, or human-in-the-loop systems.

Published research, open-source contributions, or evidence of technical leadership.

Experience turning custom research into robust, reusable platforms.

Skills and Tools

Python

PyTorch

RL (Reinforcement Learning)

SFT (Supervised Fine-Tuning)

LoRA/PEFT

RLHF

DPO

PPO

Reward Modeling

Salary and Benefits

Generous equity grant vested over four years

Housing bonus of 1.3 Lakhs distributed throughout the first year

Performance bonus ranging between 10% and 100% of the base salary

Medical insurance coverage

Food credit for every in-person workday

About the Company

Handshake organizes expert human knowledge to advance the AI economy. The company collaborates directly with frontier artificial intelligence labs on evaluation, data, and post-training challenges, building systems that convert human expertise into data and evaluations that improve frontier models. Handshake Labs specifically builds external AI products, research platforms, and customer-facing systems.

How to Apply

Interested candidates should visit the official Handshake careers page to submit an application for this position.

Skills and tech stack

Python PyTorch RL SFT LoRA PEFT RLHF DPO PPO Reward Modeling LLM Reinforcement Learning Machine Learning Fine-tuning

Questions candidates ask

What is the primary focus of the Member of Technical Staff role?

The role focuses on post-training for frontier models, involving supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, reward modeling, preference optimization, and building corresponding evaluation and data pipelines.

How many years of experience are required?

Candidates must have three or more years of demonstrated strength in post-training, fine-tuning, or model-evaluation work.

Where is the position located?

The position is located in India.

What perks and benefits are included with the job?

Benefits include a multi-year equity grant, a first-year housing bonus of 1.3 Lakhs, a performance bonus ranging from 10% to 100% of base salary, medical insurance, and daily in-person food credits.

What technical stack or tools are expected?

The role requires strong Python skills and hands-on experience with PyTorch and modern machine learning tooling for large-scale data and training workflows.

Ready to apply?

The application is on the official Handshake careers page.

Apply on company site