About Traversal

Traversal is the AI Site Reliability Engineer (AI SRE) for the enterprise.

Production complexity was already outpacing what engineering teams could manage manually, and AI-generated code is accelerating that gap. Traversal is built for that challenge, autonomously understanding and reasoning across even the largest, most complex production environments to diagnose, fix, and prevent incidents. Our mission is to free engineers from endless firefighting and give them more time to focus on creative, high-impact work.

Today, Traversal operates in mission-critical environments at some of the world’s largest enterprises, including PepsiCo, Nubank, Harvey, and DigitalOcean. Our roots remain deeply embedded in AI research, and we’ve brought together researchers from institutions including MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, and Cornell with world-class technical staff and operators from companies like Google, Meta, Datadog, ServiceNow, and Citadel Securities to take on one of the hardest problems for AI to solve. Traversal is backed by Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint Ventures, and Khosla Ventures.

The Role

As a Recruiter, you will own full-cycle hiring for some of Traversal’s most critical roles, initially focused on our Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) team. You’ll partner directly with hiring managers and founders to define hiring strategy, build and manage pipelines, and deliver an exceptional candidate experience from first outreach through offer. You’ll join a lean, high-ownership Talent team, with real latitude to build process and bar as we scale. As the team grows, this role may expand beyond EPD to support hiring across the company.

Responsibilities

Own full-cycle recruiting for assigned roles, initially within EPD and Research: manage everything from intake through offer, including sourcing, screening, and closing

Partner with leaders to build hiring strategy: calibrate role scope, must-haves, and success profiles, and translate them into effective sourcing and screening plans

Build and manage active pipelines by proactively sourcing and engaging top candidates, rather than relying solely on inbound applications

Drive a best-in-class candidate experience, ensuring every candidate has a thoughtful, well-communicated process

Improve recruiting process and infrastructure by building playbooks that scale with the team

Represent Traversal acting as a strong ambassador for the company in every candidate interaction

Requirements

5+ years of full-cycle recruiting experience, ideally including technical hiring at a startup or high-growth company

Demonstrated ability to source and close candidates independently, without heavy reliance on inbound pipelines

Strong stakeholder management skills; comfortable driving process with engineering, product, and design leaders

Excellent written and verbal communication skills

High degree of ownership and comfort operating with ambiguity and limited process

Strong organizational skills and attention to detail across a high volume of concurrent searches

Genuine curiosity about AI and enterprise software, with the ability to speak credibly to technical candidates

Nice to Have

Recruiting experience at an early-stage (Series A/B) AI or developer tooling startup

Experience recruiting for applied research or ML-heavy roles

Familiarity with modern ATS and sourcing tools (e.g., Ashby, LinkedIn Recruiter, Gem)

Experience building recruiting processes or playbooks from scratch

Experience recruiting across multiple functions beyond engineering (e.g., go-to-market, operations)

Experience with AI native recruiting tools (Juicebox, Metaview, etc.)

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 $170,000 - $250,000, 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.