AI Engineer - Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

ABOUT TRAVERSAL

Traversal https://www.traversal.com/?utm_source=chatgpt.com is the AI Site Reliability Engineer (AI SRE) for the enterprise.

Production complexity was already outpacing what engineering teams could manage manually, and AI-generated code is accelerating that gap. Traversal is built for that challenge, autonomously understanding and reasoning across even the largest, most complex production environments to diagnose, fix, and prevent incidents. Our mission is to free engineers from endless firefighting and give them more time to focus on creative, high-impact work.

Today, Traversal operates in mission-critical environments at some of the world’s largest enterprises, including PepsiCo, Nubank, Harvey, and DigitalOcean. Our roots remain deeply embedded in AI research, and we’ve brought together researchers from institutions including MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, and Cornell with world-class technical staff and operators from companies like Google, Meta, Datadog, ServiceNow, and Citadel Securities to take on one of the hardest problems for AI to solve. Traversal is backed by Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint Ventures, and Khosla Ventures.

THE ROLE

As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Traversal, you will own the last-mile delivery of the Traversal platform and product for our most strategic customers to upgrade and tune the performance of our core AI agent directly in their environments. You will need to iterate and prototype rapidly based on customer feedback, understand the nuances of production software systems across industries and scale, and build cutting edge AI systems that operate performantly across petabytes of data.

Our FDEs’ primary objective is to own large-scale strategic projects to meaningfully upgrade the core Traversal platform, product, and AI, based on their learnings from deploying Traversal and delivering value to our customers on the field. In doing so, they help drive our engineering roadmap, orchestrate cross-team initiatives, and explore entirely new opportunities for the business as a whole.

RESPONSIBILITIES

- Lead the design and implementation of scalable, robust backend systems to support AI agents and observability tools.

- Prototype and evaluate prompting strategies, reasoning workflows, and tool-use policies for agents operating on large-scale observability data and complex troubleshooting workflows.

- Collaborate with AI researchers, product engineers, and infrastructure teams to drive cross-cutting upgrades to our core platform and product offerings.

- Provide white glove deployment support for the Traversal platform and products in enterprise environments.

- Build long term relationships with customers and proactively identify new opportunities for AI deployment throughout the lifecycle of an engagement.

- Be a champion for Traversal’s mission in the field.

REQUIREMENTS

- 3+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend, data, and/or cloud infrastructure systems.