Traversal
AI Researcher
New York · Full-time
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odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$33,960 more — $193,960 — moves this role to Level III and 3 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $193,960 would place this position at wage Level III. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Computer and Information Research Scientists" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Computer and Information Research Scientists (15-1221) · New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
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from this employer's Department of Labor filings
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Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
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About the role
- As an AI Researcher at Traversal, you'll work on improving the accuracy and speed of our agents - systems that autonomously diagnose and resolve production incidents for some of the world's largest enterprises.
- This is a hands-on, production-oriented research role.
- The tooling and infrastructure are in place.
Responsibilities
- Evaluation Design: Build and maintain eval harnesses that measure real accuracy improvements on actual customer incident types - not just benchmark scores. Own the loop from hypothesis to production measurement.
- Cross-Team Collaboration: Work closely with AI engineers, infrastructure teams, and product leads to bring research into production and close the loop between experimentation and impact.
- Synthetic Data & Experimentation: Design pipelines to generate synthetic incidents and observability signals, enabling scalable training and testing in data-scarce environments.
- Production complexity was already outpacing what engineering teams could manage manually, and AI-generated code is accelerating that gap.
- We have a collaborative, hard-working culture and are energized by building the future of AI-powered software maintenance.
Requirements
- Strong software engineering depth, with the ability to work effectively 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 quickly translate learnings into product improvements
Nice to have
- Experience in SRE, observability, or backend systems, especially when paired with strong AI/ML depth
- Experience with RLHF, synthetic data pipelines, or LLM evaluation tooling
- Contributions to open-source agent frameworks such as LangGraph, DSPy, or similar
- top-tier conference publications are a plus
- Individual compensation is determined by experience, skills, and job-related knowledge.
- Traversal is a place to take on hard, meaningful problems with real ownership from day one.
- You'll work alongside people who challenge you to grow, learn constantly, and help define a new category of infrastructure software.
- We think long term, move quickly, and hold a high bar without taking ourselves too seriously.
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 $160,000-$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.
- We offer competitive salary and equity packages, health insurance, fertility benefits, a great tech setup stipend and flexible time off.
- Plus in-office snacks, team happy hours and outings, an annual company offsite, and plenty of built in time to collaborate across teams.
Benefits
- Training & Alignment: Apply fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and reward modeling techniques to align AI behavior with real-world SRE workflows.
Company info
- Our mission is to free engineers from endless firefighting and give them more time to focus on creative, high-impact work.
This listing is sourced directly from Traversal's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.