AI Engineer - Backend

About Traversal

The Role

• As a Backend AI Engineer at Traversal, you’ll play a key role in designing and building the core systems behind our AI site reliability engineer, the infrastructure that enables real-time incident detection, root cause analysis, and automated remediation in some of the most complex production environments.
• You’ll work closely with our AI and infrastructure teams to productionize novel AI agent architectures and machine learning algorithms, develop high-performance inference APIs, and build internal observability tooling.
• Your work will span ingesting and reasoning over logs, metrics, and traces at scale, optimizing systems across hybrid SaaS and on-prem deployments, and supporting mission-critical reliability for global enterprises.
• ****Responsibilities****
• Backend System Design & Architecture: Lead the design and implementation of scalable, robust backend systems to support AI agents and observability tools.
• API Development: Design and implement high-performance APIs to enable seamless communication between backend systems and frontend interfaces.
• Data Management: Ensure efficient data storage, retrieval, and processing, leveraging technologies like PostgreSQL, Redis, or others.
• AI Integration: Collaborate with AI engineers to integrate AI-driven insights and solutions into backend systems, and take ownership of API authentication and authorization frameworks.
• Performance Optimization: Monitor, optimize, and scale backend services to handle high volumes of data while ensuring low-latency performance.
• Collaboration: Partner with frontend engineers, AI researchers, and other teams to ensure a seamless, high-performance user experience.
• Mentorship: Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior engineers, helping to grow a strong backend engineering team.
• ****Requirements****
• 3+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development and full-stack systems.
• Proven ability to lead in fast-paced startup environments, with limited resources, shifting priorities, and minimal structure.
• Strong experience with Python and web frameworks such as FastAPI.
• Experience deploying applications on AWS, working with ECS or Kubernetes, Postgres for data storage, and S3 for large-scale object storage.
• Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools, specifically Datadog, to ensure the system is running smoothly and efficiently.
• Nice to Have
• Familiarity with Python-based ecosystems is a plus.
• Experience working with Agentic AI systems or in the observability domain.
• Background in large-scale, complex, data-driven applications.
• Familiarity with AI or LLM-powered products.
• ****Compensation****
• 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 $150,000–$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.

Why You Should Join Us

• We’ll make sure you’re fully supported with health insurance, a great tech setup, flexible time off, and plenty of in-office snacks.
• We offer competitive salary and equity packages, and take thoughtful consideration with every hire on our small, high-impact team.
• Traversal is fully in-office, 5 days a week, based in New York near Madison Square Park.
• We have a collaborative, hard-working culture and are energized by building the future of AI-powered software maintenance.
• Working here means owning meaningful parts of the product, having the flexibility to move fast, and learning constantly.
• This is a place to grow your career, make a real impact, and help define a new category of infrastructure software.
• ****Responsibilities****
• Backend System Design & Architecture: Lead the design and implementation of scalable, robust backend systems to support AI agents and observability tools.
• API Development: Design and implement high-performance APIs to enable seamless communication between backend systems and frontend interfaces.
• Data Management: Ensure efficient data storage, retrieval, and processing, leveraging technologies like PostgreSQL, Redis, or others.
• AI Integration: Collaborate with AI engineers to integrate AI-driven insights and solutions into backend systems, and take ownership of API authentication and authorization frameworks.
• Performance Optimization: Monitor, optimize, and scale backend services to handle high volumes of data while ensuring low-latency performance.
• Collaboration: Partner with frontend engineers, AI researchers, and other teams to ensure a seamless, high-performance user experience.
• Mentorship: Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior engineers, helping to grow a strong backend engineering team.
• ****Requirements****
• 3+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development and full-stack systems.
• Proven ability to lead in fast-paced startup environments, with limited resources, shifting priorities, and minimal structure.
• Strong experience with Python and web frameworks such as FastAPI.
• Experience deploying applications on AWS, working with ECS or Kubernetes, Postgres for data storage, and S3 for large-scale object storage.
• Familiarity with observability and monitoring tools, specifically Datadog, to ensure the system is running smoothly and efficiently.
• Nice to Have
• Familiarity with Python-based ecosystems is a plus.
• Experience working with Agentic AI systems or in the observability domain.
• Background in large-scale, complex, data-driven applications.
• Familiarity with AI or LLM-powered products.
• ****Compensation****
• 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 $150,000–$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.

Why You Should Join Us