---
title: 'AI Research Engineer at Traversal'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/ai-research-engineer-traversal-new-york-d1zd7pjyh1m6'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# AI Research Engineer at Traversal

- **Company:** Traversal
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-08-17
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/traversal/7c37b968-0dc6-4ac3-89e3-1261883a0a96

## Job description

## ABOUT TRAVERSAL

Traversal https://www.traversal.com/?utm_source=chatgpt.com is the AI Site Reliability Engineer (AI SRE) for the enterprise.

Production complexity was already outpacing what engineering teams could manage manually, and AI-generated code is accelerating that gap. Traversal is built for that challenge, autonomously understanding and reasoning across even the largest, most complex production environments to diagnose, fix, and prevent incidents. Our mission is to free engineers from endless firefighting and give them more time to focus on creative, high-impact work.

Today, Traversal operates in mission-critical environments at some of the world’s largest enterprises. Our roots remain deeply embedded in AI research, and we’ve brought together researchers from institutions including MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, and Cornell with world-class technical staff and operators from companies like Google, Meta, Datadog, ServiceNow, and Citadel Securities to take on one of the hardest problems for AI to solve. Traversal is backed by Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Hanabi, NFDG, and American Express Ventures.

## THE ROLE

As an AI Research Engineer at Traversal, you'll build the systems our research team runs on. Our agents autonomously diagnose and resolve production incidents for some of the world's largest enterprises, and improving them is an experimental problem: form a hypothesis about agent behavior, test it against real incident data, and ship what works. The bottleneck is rarely ideas. It's the infrastructure to run the experiment, trust the result, and scale the prototype.

That infrastructure is what you own. You'll build the harnesses that let researchers evaluate agents against real customer incidents, the tooling that makes agent behavior legible enough to debug, and the systems that take a promising prototype from one run to thousands. You'll design experiments alongside researchers rather than only implementing them, and you'll carry the results across the line into production.

This role sits on the research team, and it is an engineering role. We are looking for a strong backend engineer with real experimentation instincts — someone who has always run experiments on the side and wants that to be the job. No PhD required. If you want to work at the frontier of LLM agents while still building serious systems, this is the seat.

## RESPONSIBILITIES

- Research Infrastructure: Build and scale the infrastructure behind the team's research — experiment harnesses, evaluation pipelines, and trajectory tooling — so that ideas can be tested quickly and results can be trusted.
- Scaling Research Prototypes: Take promising research prototypes and make them fast, reliable, and production-ready, closing the gap between a one-off experiment and a capability that ships to enterprise customers.
- Experiment Design: Partner with researchers to design experiments — framing the hypothesis, choosing the measurement, and making sure the result is real before it drives a decision.
- Cross-Team Collaboration: Work closely with AI engineers, infrastructure teams, and product leads to bring research into production and close the loop between experimentation and impact.
- Stay on the Frontier: Track developments in LLMs, agent architectures, and evaluation methodology, translating insights into actionable improvements for Traversal's domain.
- LLM & Agent Research: Prototype and evaluate prompting strategies, reasoning workflows, and tool-use policies for agents operating on large-scale observability data and complex troubleshooting workflows. Ship improvements to production.

## REQUIREMENTS

- 5+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development and experience building scaled systems.
- Hands-on experimentation experience — running experiments, evaluating results, and iterating on them. Side projects and personal work count.
- Proven ability to lead in fast-paced startup environments, with limited resources, shifting priorities, and minimal structure.
- Strong experience with Python and web frameworks such as FastAPI.
- Experience deploying applications on AWS, working with ECS or Kubernetes, Postgres for data storage, and S3 for large-scale object storage.
- Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools to ensure the system is running smoothly and efficiently.

## NICE TO HAVE

- A research engineer background, or prior experience as the engineer embedded in a research team.
- Experience building or operating agentic AI systems.
- Background in large-scale, complex, data-driven applications.
- Familiarity with AI or LLM-powered products, and with evaluation or benchmarking tooling.

## COMPENSATION

We offer competitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance, and additional benefits. The U.S. base salary range for this full-time, in-person role in New York is $180,000–$300,000, plus equity and benefits. Our salary ranges are based on location, level, and role. Individual compensation is determined by experience, skills, and job-related knowledge.

## WHY YOU SHOULD JOIN US

Traversal is a place to take on hard, meaningful problems with real ownership from day one. You’ll work alongside people who challenge you to grow, learn constantly, and help define a new category of infrastructure software. We think long term, move quickly, and hold a high bar without taking ourselves too seriously.

We offer competitive salary and equity packages, health insurance, fertility benefits, a great tech setup stipend and flexible time off. Plus in-office snacks, team happy hours and outings, an annual company offsite, and plenty of built in time to collaborate across teams.

Traversal is fully in-office, 5 days a week, based in New York near Madison Square Park. We have a collaborative, hard-working culture and are energized by building the future of AI-powered software maintenance.

## About Traversal

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Traversal builds an AI-powered Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) platform that autonomously troubleshoots, remediates, and prevents production incidents in complex, large-scale systems.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A; $48M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States (with presence in Sweden)
- **Founded**: Not publicly available
- **Founders**: Anish Agarwal (CEO), Raj Agrawal, Ahmed Lone, Raaz Dwivedi

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: AI-driven Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, Observability, Incident Management
- **Target customers**: B2B – Enterprise engineering and operations teams at large-scale tech and non-tech companies (e.g., American Express, PepsiCo, Capital One, DigitalOcean, Kraken)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To end on-call for good by combining cutting-edge causal ML research with world-class engineering to make self-healing, fully autonomous operations a reality.

## Products & Services
- **AI SRE Platform** (SaaS / self-hosted BYOC): The core product that continuously builds a **Production World Model™** of the system and uses a **Causal Search Engine™** to perform:
  - **Alert Intelligence**: Autonomously triages alerts to catch issues before they become incidents.
  - **Incident RCA**: Traces incidents across services, dependencies, and changes to isolate root cause in minutes.
  - **Self-healing**: Converts diagnosis into automated remediation, compressing recovery time.
  - **Production Support**: Gives engineers natural‑language access to live production state – answers grounded in real‑time telemetry, code, and tribal knowledge.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: **Total Funding** – $48M (3 rounds)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Sequoia Capital (Seed lead), Kleiner Perkins (Series A lead), Amex Ventures
- **Growth Signals**:
  - 64 employees (LinkedIn, monthly headcount growth +10.8%)
  - Trusted by major enterprises: American Express, PepsiCo, Capital One, DigitalOcean, Kraken, Cloudways
  - Proven results: 70% reduction in MTTR (Cloudways), 38% reduction in high‑severity alerts (PepsiCo), 75% MTTR reduction from deployment
  - Recognized as a “Hot 25 Startups” and “60 AI Disruptors”

## Competitive Advantages
- **Causal ML foundation**: Founders and team are leading researchers in causal machine learning, giving Traversal a unique ability to understand and trace incidents across heterogeneous systems (10+ hops).
- **Production World Model™**: Continuously updated model of the entire system, unlike traditional monitoring that lacks dynamic, causal reasoning.
- **Self‑healing & BYOC**: Automated remediation that works in mission‑critical environments, with a bring‑your‑own‑cloud deployment option that security‑conscious companies prefer.
- **User‑validated efficiency**: Customers report reclaiming thousands of engineering hours per year (e.g., 6,000 hours saved annually at a top crypto exchange).

## Strategic Focus
- Deepening autonomous operations capabilities (self‑healing) and expanding enterprise sales into regulated, high‑scale industries.
- Scaling the team (9 open positions across product, engineering, sales, and security) while maintaining a high‑intensity, research‑driven culture.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as a “builders” culture – high‑intensity, early‑stage execution with outsized ownership. The team combines PhD‑level AI researchers, enterprise infrastructure builders, and high‑stakes operators (ex‑Citadel, ex‑Microsoft Research).
- **Policy**: **Fully in‑office, five days a week** in New York City (near Union Square area). High energy, collaborative environment.
- **Engineering excellence**: Opportunity to work on cutting‑edge causal ML, large‑scale distributed systems, and a product that directly reduces pain for engineers worldwide.
- **Notable perks**: Fast‑growth startup with top‑tier VC backing (Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins); chance to shape the product and culture from an early stage.

## Sources
1. [traversal.com](https://www.traversal.com/)
2. [traversal.com/about](https://www.traversal.com/about)
3. [linkedin.com/company/traversal-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/traversal-ai)
4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/traversal/faq/workplace-perception)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/traversal](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/traversal)

## Other roles at Traversal

- [Solutions Engineer - Central](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-engineer-central-traversal-remote-8kgxmanzsqc6)
- [Regional Director - West](https://feeny.ai/job/regional-director-west-traversal-remote-0bzx2k9ajy4a)
- [Staff Full-Stack Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-full-stack-product-engineer-traversal-new-york-xpv7n2pqvymm) — New York, NY
- [GTM Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-recruiter-traversal-new-york-8wbcwqz6q5s0) — New York, NY
- [Field and Events Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/field-and-events-marketing-manager-traversal-remote-mt9sqvpasevr)
- [Technical Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-recruiter-traversal-new-york-y8n2c70xg4kn) — New York, NY
- [AI Engineer - AI Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-engineer-ai-platform-traversal-new-york-h0w0hrpyrnv4) — New York, NY
- [AI Adoption Engineer - West](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-adoption-engineer-west-traversal-remote-ed2nmcs8yagk)
- [AI Adoption Engineer - East](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-adoption-engineer-east-traversal-remote-0sw2ebdgfrde)
- [AI Engineer - Cloud Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-engineer-cloud-infrastructure-traversal-new-york-az2kwtw4tfap) — New York, NY