AI Engineer - Forward Deployed Engineer

Traversal•New York, NY

6d•$200,000 - $275,000•Onsite

About The Position

Traversal is an AI Site Reliability Engineer for enterprises, built to autonomously understand complex production environments and diagnose, fix, and prevent incidents. The company serves mission-critical environments at large enterprises and combines AI research expertise with technical staff and operators from leading technology and finance companies. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will own the last-mile delivery of Traversal’s platform and product for strategic customers. You will deploy and tune the core AI agent in customer environments, rapidly prototype in response to customer feedback, and build AI systems that perform across large-scale production data. You will use learnings from customer deployments to upgrade the core platform, product, and AI, help shape the engineering roadmap, coordinate cross-team initiatives, and identify new business opportunities. This is a full-time, in-person role based in New York near Madison Square Park. Traversal describes its culture as collaborative and hard-working, with employees owning meaningful parts of the product and working on a small, high-impact team.

Requirements

At least 3 years of software engineering experience, focused on backend, data, and/or cloud infrastructure systems.
Experience with LLM-based applications and/or multi-agent systems, including judgment in model evaluation and experimental iteration to improve product accuracy and behavior.
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.

Nice To Haves

Excellent communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts to a range of audiences.
Strong project management skills, including coordinating internal and external stakeholders, leading recurring meetings, and driving pilots to completion.
Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or deployment systems such as Kubernetes.
Familiarity with day-to-day SRE workflows and pain points.

Responsibilities

Lead the design and implementation of scalable, robust backend systems that support AI agents and observability tools.
Prototype and evaluate prompting strategies, reasoning workflows, and tool-use policies for agents working with large-scale observability data and complex troubleshooting workflows.
Collaborate with AI researchers, product engineers, and infrastructure teams on cross-cutting upgrades to the core platform and product offerings.
Provide white-glove deployment support for Traversal’s platform and products in enterprise environments.
Build long-term customer relationships and proactively identify opportunities for AI deployment throughout the engagement lifecycle.
Represent and champion Traversal’s mission in the field.
Use customer deployment learnings to drive large-scale strategic upgrades to the platform, product, and AI, contribute to the engineering roadmap, orchestrate cross-team initiatives, and explore new business opportunities.