AI Engineer - AI Platform

Traversal; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Startup equity

Job summary

Traversal, based in New York, seeks an AI Platform Engineer to build the core foundations powering its AI agents. You’ll design scalable backend systems, observability, and developer tooling to deliver reliable, cost-efficient software at scale.

You will collaborate with researchers and engineers, create high-performance APIs, and guide production systems from prototype to production while maintaining safety, quality, and speed in a fast-growing enterprise AI environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and implementation of scalable backend systems for AI agents and observability.
• Design high-performance APIs enabling backend–frontend communication.
• Architect distributed systems for real-time workloads over huge telemetry data.
• Build live evaluation pipelines and benchmarks to measure AI performance.
• Collaborate with AI engineers to integrate AI insights into backend systems.
• Monitor and scale backend services for high-volume, low-latency workloads.

Job description

About Traversal

Traversal is the AI Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) for the enterprise—already trusted by some of the largest companies in the world to troubleshoot, remediate, and even prevent the most complex production incidents. Our mission is to free engineers from endless firefighting and enable them to focus on creative, high-impact work.

Our roots remain deeply embedded in AI research, and we’re channeling that scientific rigor and creativity into building the premier AI agent lab for the enterprise. Hence, what we’re proudest of is assembling the most talented yet nicest group of individuals, including researchers from MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley, to world‑class engineers from industry: Citadel Securities, Cockroach Labs, Datadog, DE Shaw, Meta, Hebbia, Perplexity, Glean, Pinecone, and more, to take on one of the hardest problems for AI to solve. Without the entire team, none of this would be possible.

The Role

As an AI Platform Engineer at Traversal, you’ll work on the core foundations that make Traversal’s AI possible while ensuring Traversal’s platform, products, and applications are delivered with a high bar for quality, reliability, resilience, cost‑effectiveness, and maintainability.

You will build and own the frameworks, shared libraries, application foundations, observability, and developer tooling that power Traversal’s systems and AI agents. This involves designing scalable distributed systems and abstractions, delivering core application framework components, implementing best practices for software architecture and software delivery while balancing velocity, research flexibility, and production reliability.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of scalable, robust backend systems to support AI agents and observability tools.

• Design and implement high-performance APIs to enable seamless communication between backend systems and frontend interfaces.

• Architect scalable distributed systems to support real-time workloads over petabytes of heterogeneous telemetry data.

• Build live evaluation pipelines, automated scoring systems, and benchmarks to measure and drive AI performance.

• Collaborate with AI engineers and scientists to integrate AI-driven insights and solutions into backend systems.

• Monitor, optimize, and scale backend services to handle high volumes of data while ensuring low‑latency performance.

Requirements

• Strong system design skills for distributed systems.

• Proven production-scale software engineering experience.

• Experience with LLM-based applications and/or multi‑agent systems.

• Strong data modeling skills and a track record of writing clean, maintainable code.

• Collaborative, impact‑driven mindset and ability to work across research and engineering teams.

Nice to Have

• Knowledge of software incidents and production SRE workflows.

• Prior experience with AI benchmarking or evaluation systems.

• Experience creating quantitative scoring systems or benchmarks in new problem domains.

• Familiarity with observability stacks (logs, metrics, traces) and telemetry systems.

• Background in agentic architectures, orchestration frameworks, or applied AI research.

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 $150,000–$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

We’ll make sure you’re fully supported with health insurance, a great tech setup, flexible time off, and plenty of in‑office snacks. We offer competitive salary and equity packages, and take thoughtful consideration with every hire on our small, high‑impact team.

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.

Working here means owning meaningful parts of the product, having the flexibility to move fast, and learning constantly. This is a place to grow your career, make a real impact, and help define a new category of infrastructure software.