AI Engineer - Cloud Infrastructure

Job description

ABOUT TRAVERSAL Traversal https://www.traversal.com/ is the AI Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) for the enterprise—already trusted by some of the largest companies in the world to troubleshoot, remediate, and even prevent the most complex production incidents. Our mission is to free engineers from endless firefighting and enable them to focus on creative, high-impact work. Our roots remain deeply embedded in AI research, and we’re channeling that scientific rigor and creativity into building the premier AI agent lab for the enterprise. Hence, what we’re proudest of is assembling the most talented yet nicest group of individuals, including researchers from MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley, to world-class engineers from industry: Citadel Securities, Cockroach Labs, Datadog, DE Shaw, ServiceNow, Glean, Perplexity, Pinecone, and more, to take on one of the hardest problems for AI to solve. Without the entire team, none of this would be possible. THE ROLE As an AI Engineer - Cloud Infrastructure on Traversal’s Infrastructure team, you’ll design, secure, and operate the core systems that power Traversal’s AI products. We already serve Fortune 50 enterprises with large-scale, multi-tenant environments, BYOC deployments, and SOC 2 Type II controls, and we’re rapidly scaling. You’ll focus on the building blocks of our Terraform-defined infrastructure and Kubernetes environments, while supporting the complex needs of operating the highly-available, highly-resilient, and cost-efficient platform that supports the Traversal AI SRE agent. This is a senior, high-impact role: you’ll own foundational systems, work across AWS-native infrastructure, cloud networking, Kubernetes environments, Terraform, Helm, Python, and more, shaping how enterprise AI reliability is built and scaled. RESPONSIBILITIES - System Design & Architecture: Design scalable, reliable infrastructure for AI workloads, inference, data pipelines, and agentic workflows - CI/CD: Build and deliver best-in-class developer experience and software development lifecycle tooling for our growing engineering team - Autoscaling: Scale on real signals (queue lag, in-flight requests, latency); add burst capacity and safe drains - Infrastructure as Code: Evolve Terraform+Helm for multi-environment deployments, secrets, policy-as-code, and workload identity - Observability: Build and deliver end-to-end visibility into our infrastructure, systems, and applications, and connect it to Traversal’s AI SRE agent for self-driving production - Security: Partner with our cloud security lead to improve Traversal’s security and compliance posture, implementing least privilege principles, JIT access workflows, default-deny egress, auditability, and policy-as-code REQUIREMENTS - 7+ years of experience at technically rigorous companies or teams - Proven experience operating cloud and Kubernetes native infrastructure and applications at scale with >99.9% availability - Demonstrated hands-on experience with AWS, EKS, Terraform, Helm - Experience designing idempotent systems (outbox, dedupe keys, safe replay) - Incident response, chaos testing, capacity planning - Strong debugging skills across infrastructure, compute, network, runtime, storage, and auth layers Nice to Have - Service mesh (Envoy/Istio), Cilium/eBPF - GPU workload operations, inference servers, token streaming gateways - Production experience building and maintaining systems in Python, Rust, and TypeScript - Data governance (PII discovery/redaction), lineage, tokenization - Experience designing, implementing, and deploying cross-region active/active architectures - Familiarity with other cloud providers (GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud) 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 $175,000–$275,000, 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.