AI Researcher

The role

You will improve the accuracy and speed of agents that autonomously diagnose and resolve production incidents. This is a hands-on research role involving designing experiments, running them on real data, and shipping improvements to production.

What you will do

• Prototype and evaluate prompting strategies, reasoning workflows, and tool-use policies for agents.
• Ship improvements to production.
• Build and maintain eval harnesses to measure accuracy improvements on customer incident types.
• Work with AI engineers, infrastructure teams, and product leads to bring research into production.
• Track developments in LLMs, agent architectures, and AI alignment.
• Apply fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and reward modeling techniques.
• Design pipelines to generate synthetic incidents and observability signals.

Required qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, or a related technical field
• Demonstrated depth in LLMs, agents, or applied machine learning
• 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
• Strong software engineering depth to work 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 translate learnings into product improvements
• Startup or early-team experience, with comfort operating in ambiguous environments

Nice to have

• Experience in SRE, observability, or backend systems
• Experience with RLHF, synthetic data pipelines, or LLM evaluation tooling
• Contributions to open-source agent frameworks such as LangGraph, DSPy, or similar
• Research experience in LLMs, agents, or reinforcement learning
• Top-tier conference publications in venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR

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 built to autonomously understand and reason across complex production environments to diagnose, fix, and prevent incidents.