AI Research Engineer — Scalable Research Infrastructure

Doist; 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 seeks an AI Research Engineer to build the systems our research team runs on, including experiment harnesses and production-ready infrastructure. You will design experiments, test hypotheses against real incident data, and scale prototypes to enterprise deployments.

Ideal candidates have 5+ years in backend software, strong Python and FastAPI skills, and hands-on experimentation experience. The role is in-person at our New York office with equity, health insurance, and growth

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering with backend focus.
• Hands-on experimentation experience — running experiments, evaluating results, and iterating on them.
• Proven ability to lead in fast-paced startup environments, with limited resources and shifting priorities.
• Strong experience with Python and web frameworks such as FastAPI.

Responsibilities

• Research Infrastructure: Build and scale the infrastructure behind the team's research — experiment harnesses, evaluation pipelines, and trajectory tooling.
• Scaling Research Prototypes: Take promising research prototypes and make them fast, reliable, and production-ready.
• Experiment Design: Partner with researchers to design experiments and measure results.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Work with AI engineers, infra, and product leads to production.
• Stay on the Frontier: Track LLMs and evaluation methods for improvements.
• LLM & Agent Research: Prototype prompting strategies and tool-use policies for agents.

Skills

Python

FastAPI

Experimentation

Backend development

Observability

Tools

AWS

ECS

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

S3

Job description

Traversal seeks an AI Research Engineer to build the systems our research team runs on, including experiment harnesses and production-ready infrastructure. You will design experiments, test hypotheses against real incident data, and scale prototypes to enterprise deployments.

Ideal candidates have 5+ years in backend software, strong Python and FastAPI skills, and hands-on experimentation experience. The role is in-person at our New York office with equity, health insurance, and growth