AI Researcher

Role Overview

As 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. This 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.

What You Will Do

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. Evaluate Design: Build and maintain eval harnesses that measure real accuracy improvements on actual customer incident types — not just benchmark scores.

Why It Might Be a Fit

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 $160,000–$300,000, plus equity and benefits.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, or a related technical field
• Deep applied AI expertise, including strong working knowledge of LLMs, transformers, reinforcement learning, or neural networks in agentic systems
• Strong judgment in model evaluation and experimental iteration to improve product accuracy and behavior
• Strong software engineering depth, with the ability to work effectively in a complex production codebase and ship production-quality code
• Some experience shipping AI or ML systems to production
• Ability to run rigorous experiments, interpret results, and quickly translate learnings into product improvements
• Startup or early-team experience, with comfort operating in ambiguous environments and building without mature infrastructure

Benefits

• Competitive compensation
• Startup equity
• Health insurance
• Flexible time off
• In-office snacks
• Great tech setup