AI Engineer - Backend/Platform

The role

You will build and own the frameworks, shared libraries, application foundations, observability, and developer tooling that power Traversal's systems and AI agents. This involves designing scalable distributed systems and abstractions to support AI performance and production reliability.

What you will do

• Lead the design and implementation of scalable, robust backend systems to support AI agents and observability tools.
• Design and implement high-performance APIs to enable seamless communication between backend systems and frontend interfaces.
• Architect scalable distributed systems to support real-time workloads over petabytes of heterogeneous telemetry data.
• Build live evaluation pipelines, automated scoring systems, and benchmarks to measure and drive AI performance.
• Collaborate with AI engineers and scientists to integrate AI-driven insights and solutions into backend systems.
• Monitor, optimize, and scale backend services to handle high volumes of data while ensuring low-latency performance.

Required qualifications

• Strong system design skills for distributed systems.
• Proven production-scale software engineering experience.
• Experience with LLM-based applications and/or multi-agent systems.
• Strong data modeling skills and a track record of writing clean, maintainable code.
• Collaborative, impact-driven mindset and ability to work across research and engineering teams.

Nice to have

• Knowledge of software incidents and production SRE workflows.
• Prior experience with AI benchmarking or evaluation systems.
• Experience creating quantitative scoring systems or benchmarks in new problem domains.
• Familiarity with observability stacks (logs, metrics, traces) and telemetry systems.
• Background in agentic architectures, orchestration frameworks, or applied AI research.

Benefits

• startup equity
• health insurance
• fertility benefits
• great tech setup stipend
• flexible time off
• in-office snacks
• team happy hours and outings
• annual company offsite

About the company

Traversal is the AI Site Reliability Engineer (AI SRE) for the enterprise. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint Ventures, and Khosla Ventures.