Traversal · 3 months ago
AI Researcher
New York, NY
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level
$150K/yr - $300K/yrTraversal is an AI Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) trusted by major companies to troubleshoot and prevent complex production incidents. As an AI Researcher, you will train intelligent AI agents for root cause analysis in high-pressure environments, leading research in areas such as LLM fine-tuning and deep reinforcement learning.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)SoftwareSoftware Engineering
Responsibilities
LLM & Agent Research: Prototype and evaluate novel prompting strategies, reasoning workflows, and tool-use policies for agents handling large-scale observability data and complex troubleshooting workflows
Training & Alignment: Explore and apply fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and reward modeling techniques to align AI behavior with real-world SRE workflows and debugging practices
Synthetic Data & Experimentation: Design pipelines to generate synthetic incidents and observability signals, enabling scalable training and testing in data-scarce scenarios
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 the latest developments in LLMs, agentic architectures, and AI alignment—translating insights into actionable improvements
Qualification
Required
PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Electrical Engineering, or related field (or equivalent research experience)
Strong foundation in deep learning, reinforcement learning, or robotics
Hands-on experience with fine-tuning LLMs
Ability to design and run rigorous experiments, analyze outcomes, and iterate quickly
Demonstrated ability to collaborate across engineering and research boundaries and communicate complex ideas clearly
Preferred
Background in observability (logs, metrics, traces) or production infrastructure debugging
Experience with RLHF, synthetic data pipelines, or LLM evaluation tooling
Contributions to open-source agent frameworks or academic publications
Familiarity with Terraform, Kubernetes, or ML orchestration platforms
Benefits
Competitive compensation
Startup equity
Health insurance
Flexible time off
Plenty of in-office snacks
Company
Traversal
Traversal is building the AI SRE for the enterprise.
Founded in 2023
11-50 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageTotal Funding
$48MKey Investors
Sequoia CapitalKleiner Perkins
2025-06-20Seed
2025-06-18Series A· $48M
Company data provided by crunchbase