About Traversal: Pioneering AI Site Reliability Engineering
The complexity of modern production environments is spiraling, with AI-generated code only accelerating this challenge. At Traversal, we are building the AI Site Reliability Engineer (AI SRE) for the enterprise, an autonomous system designed to understand, reason, diagnose, fix, and prevent incidents across even the largest and most intricate production landscapes.
Our mission is profound: to liberate engineers from the relentless cycle of firefighting, enabling them to dedicate their intellect to creative, high-impact innovation. Today, Traversal safeguards mission-critical environments for some of the world’s leading enterprises.
Our foundation is rooted deeply in advanced AI research, bringing together brilliant minds from institutions like MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, and Cornell. We've combined this academic prowess with world-class technical staff and operators from industry titans such as Google, Meta, Datadog, ServiceNow, and Citadel Securities. This exceptional team is tackling one of AI's most formidable challenges. Traversal is proudly backed by Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Hanabi, NFDG, and American Express Ventures.
The Role: Security Engineer (AI-Native Foundations)
Are you ready to redefine security in the age of AI? As a Security Engineer at Traversal, you won't just follow blueprints—you'll create them. This isn't a compliance-focused role, nor is it about basic SAST integration into pipelines. You will be instrumental in elevating our security posture by designing and building AI-native security mechanisms that are intrinsically tailored to our unique operational model.
You’ll partner directly with our security leadership, shaping the strategic security roadmap across our product, cloud, and infrastructure. This is a high-impact, senior position where you will own broad-scope projects end-to-end: from designing and shipping the secure foundations that Traversal engineers build upon, to pioneering a future where automated verification, not manual code review, is the definitive arbiter of safe change deployment. Furthermore, you will embed critical security capabilities directly into Traversal’s products and cloud infrastructure, ensuring the robust protection of our enterprise customers and their invaluable data.
Traversal proudly serves Fortune 50 enterprises across multi-tenant environments, BYOC deployments, and diverse compliance regimes. Your expertise will span application behavior, identity, infrastructure, deployment boundaries, data security, and access controls, continuously advancing Traversal’s security posture. We welcome highly skilled software and infrastructure engineers who have previously owned security-critical systems and are eager to specialize in security, as well as experienced security engineers driven to build. Regardless of your background, you will lead and deliver independently, setting technical direction across related work streams and building capabilities that other teams will adopt and extend.
What You'll Do: Key Responsibilities
Secure Constructs & Paved Paths: Architect and implement the libraries, default configurations, and workflows that make building securely the most intuitive and easiest path for Traversal engineers.
Security Invariants & Guardrails: Define and implement robust controls that continuously verify critical security properties across our products and cloud infrastructure.
Build Security into Products: Design and ship advanced security capabilities within Traversal’s products to empower and protect enterprise security teams.
Findings to Fixes: Proactively discover and verify security issues, thoroughly assess their impact, collaborate with system owners to ship fixes, and embed preventative tests or controls to eliminate recurrence.
Security Architecture: Design scalable security systems and major components, meticulously defining interfaces, invariants, and evolution paths to ensure seamless operation across SaaS and BYOC deployments.
Delivery & Adoption: Lead complex multi-phase rollouts, migrations, and deprecations across teams with meticulous sequencing and de-risking, ensuring successful adoption through enablement and measurable success criteria.
Operational Ownership: Deliver operationally complete systems, including comprehensive monitoring, high-quality alerting, clear runbooks, and secure rollout/upgrade paths; expertly debug and resolve security incidents within your domain.
Technical Direction: Establish technical direction for specific security domains, effectively connect technical initiatives to customer and business outcomes, and leverage results to shape the evolving roadmap with product and engineering leadership.
Mentorship & Leverage: Mentor engineers and emerging technical leaders, and create reusable patterns, libraries, and reference implementations that empower others to extend your work without direct dependency.
What You'll Bring: Requirements
4-6+ years of hands-on experience building or securing production software or infrastructure within technically rigorous companies or teams, specifically including sensitive, mission-critical systems.
Proven ability to independently lead ambiguous, cross-team security projects from initial design through implementation, migration, and widespread adoption, with minimal predefined structure.
Strong programming proficiency in a language such as Python, Rust, or Go, coupled with the ability to effectively contribute to and manage existing codebases.
Deep hands-on expertise in either application security or cloud security, complemented by a working knowledge of the other domain, gained through a dedicated security role or by owning security-critical systems as a software or infrastructure engineer.
Technical depth in risk assessment, viewing standards like NIST & SOC2 as a baseline, not necessarily the ultimate target.
Practical understanding of authentication, authorization, trust boundaries, secrets management, and common failure modes prevalent in distributed systems.
Clear written communication skills and a collaborative, constructive approach to technical disagreements.
Bonus Points: Nice to Have
Experience navigating and fulfilling enterprise customer security requirements.
Proficiency in building on and securing infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform) and container orchestration systems (e.g., Kubernetes).
Expertise in detection engineering, security telemetry, or automated control validation.
Hands-on offensive testing experience paired with a track record of shipping effective remediations.
Experience applying formal methods for security assurance.
You don’t need experience in every area listed above. We are most interested in what you’ve built, how you approached complex decisions, and how your contributions transformed the systems and teams around you.
Compensation & Benefits: Invest in Your Future
We believe in rewarding top talent for tackling challenging problems. Traversal offers competitive compensation, significant startup equity, comprehensive health insurance, and additional benefits. The U.S. base salary range for this full-time, in-person role in New York is $240,000-$300,000, plus equity and benefits. Individual compensation is determined by experience, skills, and job-related knowledge within our transparent salary ranges based on location, level, and role.
Why Join Traversal: Impact, Growth, and Innovation
Traversal is the destination for engineers who crave meaningful impact and ownership from day one. You'll work alongside exceptional individuals who will challenge you to grow, learn continuously, and actively define a new category of infrastructure software. We cultivate a culture that thinks long-term, executes with agility, maintains an incredibly high bar for quality, all without taking ourselves too seriously.
Beyond competitive salary and equity, we provide excellent health insurance (including fertility benefits), a generous tech setup stipend, and flexible time off. Our vibrant in-office environment features snacks, regular team happy hours and outings, an annual company offsite, and abundant dedicated time for cross-team collaboration.
Traversal is a fully in-office, 5 days a week company, based in New York near Madison Square Park. We thrive on a collaborative, hard-working culture, energized by the shared vision of building the future of AI-powered software maintenance.