{"id":449696,"url":"https://alion.io/job/traversal-ai-researcher","title":"AI Researcher","company":{"id":173605,"name":"Traversal","domain":"traversal.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/traversal","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":10,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-27T05:46:45Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["New York, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":160000,"max":300000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":300000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Datadog","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Reward Modeling","optional":false},{"name":"ServiceNow","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false},{"name":"DSPy","optional":true},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true},{"name":"LangGraph","optional":true},{"name":"RLHF","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-05-30T19:18:43Z","employer_posted_date":"2025-05-30","last_verified_at":"2026-10-27T10:25:59Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":514,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":514},"description":"About Traversal\nTraversal is the AI Site Reliability Engineer (AI SRE) for the enterprise.\nProduction 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.\nToday, Traversal operates in mission-critical environments at some of the world’s largest enterprises. 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, Hanabi, NFDG, and American Express Ventures.\nThe Role\nAs an AI Researcher at Traversal, you'll work on improving the accuracy and speed of our agents - systems that autonomously diagnose and resolve production incidents for some of the world’s largest enterprises.\nThis is a hands-on, production-oriented research role. You will design experiments, run them on real data, and ship improvements. Not flag them - ship them.\nYou'll work end-to-end: identify a failure mode in agent reasoning, design an intervention, evaluate it against real customer traces, and get it into production. The tooling and infrastructure are in place. The research problem is hard. The feedback loop is fast. This is not a publish-papers role. It is a make-the-agent-work role - build-and-ship cutting edge AI.\nResponsibilities\nLLM & Agent Research: Prototype and evaluate prompting strategies, reasoning workflows, and tool-use policies for agents operating on large-scale observability data and complex troubleshooting workflows. Ship improvements to production.\n\nEvaluation Design: Build and maintain eval harnesses that measure real accuracy improvements on actual customer incident types - not just benchmark scores. Own the loop from hypothesis to production measurement.\n\nCross-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.\n\nStay on the Frontier: Track developments in LLMs, agent architectures, and AI alignment, translating insights into actionable improvements for Traversal’s domain.\n\nTraining & Alignment: Apply fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and reward modeling techniques to align AI behavior with real-world SRE workflows.\n\nSynthetic Data & Experimentation: Design pipelines to generate synthetic incidents and observability signals, enabling scalable training and testing in data-scarce environments.\n\nRequirements\nPhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, or a related technical field; demonstrated depth in LLMs, agents, or applied machine learning\n\nDeep applied AI expertise, including strong working knowledge of LLMs, transformers, reinforcement learning, or neural networks in agentic systems\n\nStrong judgment in model evaluation and experimental iteration to improve product accuracy and behavior\n\nStrong software engineering depth, with the ability to work effectively in a complex production codebase and ship production-quality code\n\nSome experience shipping AI or ML systems to production\n\nAbility to run rigorous experiments, interpret results, and quickly translate learnings into product improvements\n\nStartup or early-team experience, with comfort operating in ambiguous environments and building without mature infrastructure\n\nNice to Have\nExperience in SRE, observability, or backend systems, especially when paired with strong AI/ML depth\n\nExperience with RLHF, synthetic data pipelines, or LLM evaluation tooling\n\nContributions to open-source agent frameworks such as LangGraph, DSPy, or similar\n\nResearch experience in LLMs, agents, or reinforcement learning, including publications in venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR; top-tier conference publications are a plus\n\nCompensation\nWe 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 $160,000-$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.\nWhy You Should Join Us\nTraversal is a place to take on hard, meaningful problems with real ownership from day one. You’ll work alongside people who challenge you to grow, learn constantly, and help define a new category of infrastructure software. We think long term, move quickly, and hold a high bar without taking ourselves too seriously.\nWe offer competitive salary and equity packages, health insurance, fertility benefits, a great tech setup stipend and flexible time off. Plus in-office snacks, team happy hours and outings, an annual company offsite, and plenty of built in time to collaborate across teams.\nTraversal is fully in-office, 5 days a week, based in New York near Madison Square Park. 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