Traversal
AI Research Engineer
New York · Senior · Full-time
Stay score
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
$13,960 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
Files H-1B transfers
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
- Our agents autonomously diagnose and resolve production incidents for some of the world's largest enterprises, and improving them is an experimental problem: form a hypothesis about agent behavior, test it against real incident data, and ship what works.
- It's the infrastructure to run the experiment, trust the result, and scale the prototype.
- This role sits on the research team, and it is an engineering role.
Responsibilities
- Research Infrastructure: Build and scale the infrastructure behind the team's research - experiment harnesses, evaluation pipelines, and trajectory tooling - so that ideas can be tested quickly and results can be trusted.
- Experiment Design: Partner with researchers to design experiments - framing the hypothesis, choosing the measurement, and making sure the result is real before it drives a decision.
- 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.
- Production complexity was already outpacing what engineering teams could manage manually, and AI-generated code is accelerating that gap.
- 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.
- We have a collaborative, hard-working culture and are energized by building the future of AI-powered software maintenance.
Requirements
- 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 to ensure the system is running smoothly and efficiently.
Nice to have
- A research engineer background, or prior experience as the engineer embedded in a research team.
- Background in large-scale, complex, data-driven applications.
- Familiarity with AI or LLM-powered products, and with evaluation or benchmarking tooling.
- 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.
- Traversal is fully in-office, 5 days a week, based in New York near Madison Square Park.
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 $180,000-$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.
Company info
- Our mission is to free engineers from endless firefighting and give them more time to focus on creative, high-impact work.
- We are looking for a strong backend engineer with real experimentation instincts - someone who has always run experiments on the side and wants that to be the job.
- Scaling Research Prototypes: Take promising research prototypes and make them fast, reliable, and production-ready, closing the gap between a one-off experiment and a capability that ships to enterprise customers.
This listing is sourced directly from Traversal's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.