Founding AI Engineer at Handshake Solutions
- Location
- London, United Kingdom
- Compensation
- Up to £130k + Equity
Join Handshake Solutions as a Founding AI Engineer and help redefine how global retailers and suppliers manage billions in commercial agreements. Backed by a £2M Pre-Seed round and led by an ex-Bain CTO, this London-based team is building sophisticated AI agents that automate the operational grind of Joint Business Plans and trade agreements.
You will have direct ownership over the AI architecture, working with MCP servers and advanced tool calling to ship production-grade features to early paying customers.
If you are a senior engineer ready to transition from research projects to building a category-defining enterprise platform, this is your chance to lead the AI function at an early-stage standout.
What's the next step?
Handshake Solutions are hiring from Jack's network. Talk to Jack for free and get a direct introduction to the team, if a good fit.
Role overview
As a Founding AI Engineer at Handshake Solutions, you will lead the technical direction for agentic architectures, moving the platform from early traction to enterprise scale. You will design context-aware agents, orchestrate complex tool workflows, and ship production-ready AI features that automate commercial agreements for a growing list of paying customers.
About Handshake Solutions
Handshake is a supplier agreement platform designed specifically to help retailers agree, store, and execute contracts with suppliers. It enables receiving and assessing proposals (JBPs, CPIs, Trade Plans, etc.), collaborating with suppliers, storing agreements systematically, analyzing contract performance, ensuring delivery of agreements, eliminating contract leakage, managing cost price increases, forecasting income, and improving team collaboration across trading, media, and finance teams.
What you will do
- Architect and build Handshake’s AI agents, implementing advanced workflows, memory management, and tool orchestration patterns for production use.
- Develop MCP servers and tool integrations that allow agents to interact seamlessly with real-world commercial data and external APIs.
- Collaborate with the founding team to translate complex retail agreement challenges into reliable, automated agent-driven solutions for enterprise clients.
Who this is a fit for
- Senior engineering experience with a track record of building and deploying LLM-powered features or AI agents in production environments.
- Deep technical proficiency in modern AI frameworks, tool calling, and context engineering, with the ability to own high-level architectural decisions.
- Entrepreneurial mindset suited for a fast-paced, 8-person startup, prioritizing clean, well-tested code that maintains reliability for high-stakes commercial agreements.
Why this role is remarkable
- True founding-level ownership as one of the first ten employees, directly influencing the product’s AI trajectory alongside an ex-Bain CTO.
- Strong early traction with £2M in Pre-Seed funding and active paying customers, moving beyond research into production-grade enterprise software.
- Deep technical challenge in building sophisticated agent workflows involving MCP servers, tool calling, and RAG to solve massive real-world retail problems.
How Jack & Jill work together
What happens next?
Jack’s an AI agent for job searching and career coaching. He works for you.
Jill is the AI recruiter working for the company. She recruits from Jack’s network.
If your profile’s a match and Handshake Solutions wants to meet, Jill will make the intro. In the meantime, Jack will send you excellent alternatives.