AI Engineer - Forward Deployed Engineer

About Traversal

Traversal 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, including PepsiCo, Nubank, Harvey, and DigitalOcean. 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, Redpoint Ventures, and Khosla Ventures.

The Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Traversal, you will own the last-mile delivery of the Traversal platform and product for our most strategic customers to upgrade and tune the performance of our core AI agent directly in their environments. You will need to iterate and prototype rapidly based on customer feedback, understand the nuances of production software systems across industries and scale, and build cutting edge AI systems that operate performantly across petabytes of data.

Our FDEs' primary objective is to own large-scale strategic projects to meaningfully upgrade the core Traversal platform, product, and AI, based on their learnings from deploying Traversal and delivering value to our customers on the field. In doing so, they help drive our engineering roadmap, orchestrate cross-team initiatives, and explore entirely new opportunities for the business as a whole.

Responsibilities

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

• Prototype and evaluate prompting strategies, reasoning workflows, and tool-use policies for agents operating on large-scale observability data and complex troubleshooting workflows.

• Collaborate with AI researchers, product engineers, and infrastructure teams to drive cross-cutting upgrades to our core platform and product offerings.

• Provide white glove deployment support for the Traversal platform and products in enterprise environments.

• Build long term relationships with customers and proactively identify new opportunities for AI deployment throughout the lifecycle of an engagement.

• Be a champion for Traversal's mission in the field.

Requirements

• 3+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend, data, and/or cloud infrastructure systems.

• Experience with LLM-based applications and/or multi-agent systems, with judgment in model evaluation and experimental iteration to improve product accuracy and behavior.

• Proven ability to lead in fast-paced startup environments, with minimal structure, shifting priorities, and limited resources.

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

• Experience deploying and maintaining applications on AWS, working with ECS or EKS, Postgres for data storage, and S3 for large-scale object storage.

• Strong familiarity with observability and monitoring tools to ensure the system is running smoothly and efficiently.

Nice to Have

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to a range of audiences.

• Strong project management skills, being able to coordinate across multiple internal/external stakeholders, lead recurring meetings, and drive pilots to completion.

• Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code tools like Terraform or deployment systems like Kubernetes.

• Familiarity with SRE day-to-day workflows and pain points.

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 $200,000-$275,000, 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.