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AI Engineer - Backend

New York

About Traversal

Traversal is building an AI site reliability engineer that identifies, root causes, and fixes production issues within complex software infrastructure. We're a team of some of the best AI talent - including professors at Columbia & Cornell with PhDs from MIT & Berkeley - with over 20 years of research experience, pushing the forefront of AI Agents and Causal AI. Traversal is already deployed in some of the largest enterprises in the world helping improve the resilience of mission critical systems that serve millions of people worldwide, with a decrease in MTTD/MTTR of up to 90%.

The Role

As a Backend AI Engineer at Traversal, you’ll play a key role in designing and building the core systems behind our AI site reliability engineer, the infrastructure that enables real-time incident detection, root cause analysis, and automated remediation in some of the most complex production environments. You’ll work closely with our AI and infrastructure teams to productionize novel AI agent architectures and machine learning algorithms, develop high-performance inference APIs, and build internal observability tooling. Your work will span ingesting and reasoning over logs, metrics, and traces at scale, optimizing systems across hybrid SaaS and on-prem deployments, and supporting mission-critical reliability for global enterprises. 

Responsibilities

  • Backend System Design & Architecture: Lead the design and implementation of scalable, robust backend systems to support AI agents and observability tools.
  • API Development: Design and implement high-performance APIs to enable seamless communication between backend systems and frontend interfaces.
  • Data Management: Ensure efficient data storage, retrieval, and processing, leveraging technologies like PostgreSQL, Redis, or others.
  • AI Integration: Collaborate with AI engineers to integrate AI-driven insights and solutions into backend systems, and take ownership of API authentication and authorization frameworks.
  • Performance Optimization: Monitor, optimize, and scale backend services to handle high volumes of data while ensuring low-latency performance.
  • Collaboration: Partner with frontend engineers, AI researchers, and other teams to ensure a seamless, high-performance user experience.
  • Mentorship: Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior engineers, helping to grow a strong backend engineering team.

Requirements

  • 3+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development and full-stack systems.
  • Proven ability to lead in fast-paced startup environments, with limited resources, shifting priorities, and minimal structure.
  • Strong experience with Python and web frameworks such as FastAPI.
  • Hands-on experience with React, TypeScript, Next.js, and TailwindCSS to build fast, responsive, and maintainable frontends. React experience is essential, but we’re happy to support learning the other tools.
  • Experience deploying applications on AWS, working with ECS or Kubernetes, Postgres for data storage, and S3 for large-scale object storage.
  • Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools, specifically Datadog, to ensure the system is running smoothly and efficiently.

Nice to Have

  • Familiarity with Python-based ecosystems is a plus.
  • Experience working with Agentic AI systems or in the observability domain.
  • Background in large-scale, complex, data-driven applications.
  • Familiarity with AI or LLM-powered products.

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.

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