AI Research Engineer: Build Production-Grade AI Experiments

Traversal; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Equity

Office snacks

Job summary

Traversal in New York seeks an AI Research Engineer to build the backend infrastructure and experiment harnesses used by the research team. You’ll enable researchers to diagnose and resolve production incidents at enterprise scale while iterating on agent behavior and tooling.

You’ll collaborate with researchers and engineers to design experiments, scale prototypes to production, and push improvements into deployable systems. No PhD required; strong engineering instincts needed.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering with backend focus.
• Hands-on experimentation experience and ability to iterate on results.
• Proven ability to lead in fast-paced startup environments.
• Strong Python and FastAPI experience.
• Experience deploying apps on AWS (ECS/Kubernetes) and using PostgreSQL & S3.
• Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools.

Responsibilities

• Research Infrastructure: build and scale the infrastructure behind the team’s research and experiment harnesses.
• Scale research prototypes to production-ready systems for enterprise customers.
• Design experiments with researchers to validate hypotheses and measurements.
• Collaborate with AI engineers, infra teams, and product leads to bring research into production.
• Stay on the frontier of LLMs and agent research, translating insights into improvements.

Skills

Backend development

Experimentation

Python

FastAPI

AWS

ECS

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

S3

Observability

Leadership

Tools

Kubernetes

ECS

PostgreSQL

S3

Job description

Traversal in New York seeks an AI Research Engineer to build the backend infrastructure and experiment harnesses used by the research team. You’ll enable researchers to diagnose and resolve production incidents at enterprise scale while iterating on agent behavior and tooling.

You’ll collaborate with researchers and engineers to design experiments, scale prototypes to production, and push improvements into deployable systems. No PhD required; strong engineering instincts needed.