Engineering Manager

About Traversal

Traversal 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

We're looking for an experienced and hands-on Engineering Manager to oversee a high-performing team of engineers. This team builds Traversal’s intelligent observability systems, with a focus on root cause analysis, alerting, and high-value integrations with our enterprise customers.

Impact/Why Now

Traversal is at an inflection point: our customer base and engineering team are both growing quickly, which has created new challenges in scaling deployments, improving the reliability of our AI, and evolving our platform. As Engineering Leader, you’ll play a pivotal role in helping us meet this moment.

As an engineering Manager at Traversal, you’ll guide the team across architecture, product execution, and research-to-production workflows, all while helping scale both our customer impact and internal platform quality. You’ll work closely with cross-functional partners and stay deeply technical, balancing short-term execution with long-term vision.

Responsibilities

• Lead and scale a team of AI and forward deployed engineers working on root cause analysis, alerting, and production agent integrations
• Define and execute both near-term customer goals and long-term technical roadmaps
• Stay hands-on: participate in architecture reviews, dive into code, and unblock engineers
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, infra, and research teams to ship well-integrated systems
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence and rapid, responsible iteration
• Own hiring and team building — from sourcing and interviewing to onboarding and mentorship
• Turn learnings from customer deployments into reusable platform primitives
• Set the technical and cultural tone for a high-ownership, high-trust engineering team

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience in an engineering management or tech lead role
• 6+ years of experience as a hands-on software engineer
• Proven track record building and maintaining customer-facing systems
• Comfort being forward deployed or working closely with customers in production environments
• Experience working on performance-critical products (search, infrastructure, recommendations, trading, etc.)
• Strong technical judgment and a bias toward action
• Demonstrated ability to recruit, grow, and retain top engineering talent
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills across disciplines

Nice To Have

• Experience working with observability pipelines (logs, metrics, traces) or infra systems at scale
• Familiarity with LLMs, AI agent frameworks, or evaluation tooling
• Production experience with tools like Terraform, Kubernetes, or ML orchestration platforms
• Background in applied AI or an interest in learning from close proximity to it
• Hands-on Rust or Python experience

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 $250,000–$400,000, 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.