Freelance Network Engineer Jobs in San Ramon, CA

Handshake is the career network for the AI economy. 20 million knowledge workers, 1,600 educational institutions, 1 million employers (including 100% of the Fortune 50), and every foundational AI lab trust Handshake to power career discovery, hiring, and upskilling, from freelance AI training gigs to first internships to full-time careers and beyond. This unique value is leading to unparalleled growth; in 2025, we tripled our ARR at scale.

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

• Work hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world’s top educational institutions

• Join a team with leadership from Scale AI, Meta, xAI, Notion, Coinbase, and Palantir, among others

• Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue

Handshake AI builds the training data that frontier labs use to push their models forward. Our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team is a high-leverage group of engineers who embed directly with our highest-value customers, become experts in each customer’s specific needs, and build the bespoke solutions that win business and make engagements succeed. We’re hiring a Senior Product Manager to be the first PM embedded with this team. This is a highly entrepreneurial role: you’ll be designing the product function for FDE as much as running it.

A centerpiece of the role is off-platform tasking: our customers often want work completed directly in their own tools and environments like lab-built annotation surfaces, specialized research environments, and third-party platforms we integrate with on their behalf. You’ll own that experience end to end, making it as seamless and trustworthy for our fellows to discover and access work on external surfaces, complete tasks, track time, get paid, and receive quality feedback. You’ll be the expert on each customer's unique environment, and what it takes to make fellows successful on them.

You’ll embed with a customer, deeply understand their tooling and constraints, ship the solution that unlocks the engagement fast, and then help identify which of those solutions should graduate into the platform so the next ten customers get them out of the box. You’ll work across whatever our highest-value customers need next, with the autonomy to move quickly and the visibility that comes with revenue‑critical work.

• Customer-embedded discovery and delivery - Sit with our most important customers and their engineering teams, understand their tools, workflows, and constraints firsthand, and translate what you learn into solutions FDE can ship in days or weeks, not quarters.

• The off-platform tasking experience - The end-to-end journey of a fellow working in a customer’s environment: discovering and claiming work, getting access and credentials, completing tasks, tracking time, getting paid accurately, and receiving quality feedback.

• Bespoke-to-platform graduation - Influence what solutions should generalize into platform primitives that make every future integration faster, turning FDE’s best one‑off solutions into durable product solutions.

• Goals, metrics, and tracking - Define success metrics that measure speed and repeatability: time from a new customer need to a shipped solution, time from a new customer surface to first task live, fellow experience on external surfaces, and how much of each new engagement is served by existing product versus net‑new build.

• Cross-functional partnership - Work with FDE engineers on scoping and sequencing, with Operations on running customer projects at scale, with platform teams when bespoke work graduates into core product, and directly with customers as the product voice of the engagement.

• 5+ years as a product manager shipping production code with engineering teams, ideally in customer‑facing, integrations, or platform contexts.

• Entrepreneurial and forward‑deployed by instinct: you’re energized by embedding with a customer, understanding their world firsthand, and building the thing that unlocks the deal without waiting for a playbook.

• Platform over one‑off mindset. You’ve built products where every customer looks different from the last, and you know the difference between shipping another bespoke solution and building a configurable system that handles needs nobody anticipated.

• Systems thinker. You can connect the dots across customer environments, worker experience, and platform infrastructure, spot the edge cases, and integrate them into coherent product decisions.

• Strong product instincts in ambiguous, fast‑iterating spaces. You can scope a problem from a customer conversation to a PRD to a shipped feature in hours, not days.

• Data‑informed but action‑oriented. You use data and customer signals to prioritize, but you trust user feedback and move quickly when the signal is clear.

• Experience as a PM (or forward deployed engineer) at a company known for embedding with customers (forward‑deployed, solutions, or professional‑services‑adjacent product work).

• Experience with human‑data, annotation, or AI training‑data workflows, or exposure to frontier‑lab data operations and tooling.

• Experience building integrations, browser extensions, or products that instrument work happening in third‑party software.

• Experience at a marketplace or gig platform where worker experience and marketplace integrity had to be balanced.

• 0→1 experience standing up new product surfaces inside a fast‑moving research‑adjacent org without a fully formed playbook.

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.