# Darshdeep Hora

> Darshdeep Hora is a San Francisco Bay Area software engineer whose career has moved from Microsoft and Coinbase to founding-stage work at Blackbird Labs, agent evaluation at Sierra, and enterprise AI at Handshake. His public work is unusually consistent: turn subjective human judgment into systems that can be measured, tested, and trusted. In 2026, he co-authored Handshake's account-preparation agent case study, reporting a 78 percent reduction in preparation time and roughly 40 hours returned to each seller every quarter.

- **Role:** Engineer at Handshake
- **Organizations:** Handshake, Sierra, Blackbird Labs, Coinbase, Microsoft, Wesleyan University
- **Education:** BA in Computer Science and Physics, Wesleyan University, The Doon School
- **Known for:** Co-built Handshake's QBR agent, reported to reduce account-preparation time from 45 minutes to about 10 minutes per account., Helped develop a 54-criterion evaluation rubric for customer-facing QBR decks at Handshake., Co-authored Sierra's public explanation of how LLM-based monitors are evaluated against team-labeled conversations and model agreement.

## Career timeline

- **2011-2015** — Studied computer science and physics at Wesleyan University and competed on the men's varsity crew team.
- **2015** — Worked as a summer research intern in Professor Francis Starr's physics group at Wesleyan.
- **After 2015** — Held engineering roles at Microsoft and Coinbase. Public sources do not establish exact dates.
- **Later** — Worked as a founding engineer at Blackbird Labs. Public sources do not establish exact dates.
- **2026-05** — Co-authored Sierra's 'Who monitors the monitors?' on evaluating always-on AI quality monitors.
- **2026-08** — Co-authored Handshake's account-preparation agent case study, reporting a 78 percent time reduction.

## Achievements

- Co-built Handshake's QBR agent, reported to reduce account-preparation time from 45 minutes to about 10 minutes per account.
- Helped develop a 54-criterion evaluation rubric for customer-facing QBR decks at Handshake.
- Co-authored Sierra's public explanation of how LLM-based monitors are evaluated against team-labeled conversations and model agreement.
- Worked as a founding engineer at Blackbird Labs after engineering roles at Coinbase and Microsoft.
- Completed a BA in Computer Science and Physics at Wesleyan University while competing for four years on the men's crew team.

## Latest updates

- **2026-08** — Co-authored Handshake's article on a QBR agent that reduced account-preparation time by 78 percent and returned roughly 40 hours per quarter to each seller.
- **2026-05** — Co-authored Sierra's technical article on testing AI monitors with human-labeled conversations and model agreement.

## Links

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darshdeep-hora-a5345587

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/darshdeep-hora
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-27