Traversal careers: remote jobs, culture and where they hire

Traversal has raised $48M in disclosed funding, announced in a single June 18, 2025 launch out of stealth that combined a seed round led by Sequoia Capital (partners Bogomil Balkansky and Charlie Curnin, who first partnered with the company in 2024) and a Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from NFDG (Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross) and Hanabi (Mike Volpi and Bryan Offutt). On March 4, 2026 Amex Ventures made a strategic investment of undisclosed size, announced alongside a partnership in which American Express's global infrastructure organization adopted the product. No valuation or revenue figures have been published.

Traversal builds an AI site reliability engineer: agents that triage alerts, find the root cause of production incidents and, increasingly, fix them without a human in the loop. The platform is built from a Production World Model that maps dependencies across petabyte-scale telemetry, a Causal Search Engine that turns correlated alerts into a causally consistent diagnosis, and Traversal Workers, autonomous agents for triage, root cause analysis and self-healing remediation that went generally available in September 2026. It also ships an agentless data capture layer, a Microsoft Teams integration and a Knowledge Bank for production documentation, and it runs in bring-your-own-cloud and on-premise deployments for security-sensitive enterprises.

Customers include DigitalOcean (38% lower mean time to resolution and about 3,600 engineering hours saved a year), Cloudways (70% lower MTTR and about 96,000 support hours saved), Eventbrite, PepsiCo, American Express and a Fortune 100 financial services company that runs Traversal on-premise across thousands of applications and 250 billion logs a day, where it reached 82% root cause accuracy and a 32% cut in potential MTTR within six months. On 25 real high-severity incidents at a large financial services enterprise, Traversal's own benchmark put it 255 Elo points ahead of frontier models given direct API and MCP access. The company came out of stealth in June 2025 and doubled headcount in the two months before March 2026; its team mixes researchers from MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia and Cornell with engineers from Google, Meta, Datadog, ServiceNow, Citadel Securities, Cockroach Labs, DE Shaw, Glean, Perplexity and Pinecone.

Anish Agarwal, CEO and co-founder. Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University since 2023, working on causal machine learning. Ph.D. in EECS from MIT advised by Alberto Abadie, Munther Dahleh and Devavrat Shah, followed by a Simons Institute postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley in 2022; earlier a research scientist at Amazon Core AI, a researcher at Microsoft Research and a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group. Undergraduate and master's degrees from Caltech; won a USENIX NSDI Best Paper Award in 2023. Originally from Singapore.

Raaz Dwivedi, Co-founder. Assistant Professor at Cornell Tech with appointments in Computer Science, ORIE and Statistics; ORCA-Bench co-author. Ph.D. in EECS from UC Berkeley (2021) co-advised by Martin Wainwright and Bin Yu, then a FODSI postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and MIT under Susan Murphy and Devavrat Shah; earlier at Microsoft Research and WorldQuant. B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay, where he received the President's Gold Medal after an All India Rank of 10 in the IIT-JEE. Blackwell Rosenbluth Award, 2024.

Raj Agrawal, Co-founder. Ph.D. in EECS from MIT (2021), where he held the Ashar Aziz Presidential Fellowship and met Anish Agarwal during their doctorates; his work covers graphical models and large-scale machine learning systems. Previously at Basis and Arbilex. Based in New York.

Ahmed Lone, Co-founder. Former high-frequency quantitative trader at Citadel Securities who brings the engineering, product and operating side to the founding team. B.S. in Computer Science and Finance from the University of Pennsylvania.

Traversal treats incident troubleshooting as an AI research problem rather than an observability feature, and the research is real: the founding team wrote causal machine learning papers at MIT, Berkeley, Columbia and Cornell before starting the company, and postings for AI Researcher and AI Research Engineer roles ask for NeurIPS, ICML or ICLR publications and experience with RLHF, synthetic data pipelines and LLM evaluation. Product and engineering staff describe the work as "causal agentic harnesses, agent memory systems, data processing and context engineering at petabyte scale", in the words of Head of Engineering Maxime Petazzoni on the careers page.

The company is small enough that new hires sit next to the people who wrote the papers. Bhishma Dedhia of the AI Research team says on the careers page: "For my first two months I was desk buddies with one of the founders. We'd riff on technical ideas the way you do in grad school, where everyone's genuinely curious and no one's too senior to engage." Stevens Pineda in Marketing: "What has surprised me most since joining Traversal is how much ownership and trust people are given from day one."

Go-to-market roles get the same founder access. Solutions Engineers work directly with the CEO and CTO to turn founder-led sales into a repeatable process, Account Executives own full cycles against Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and New Relic, and the Sales Development lead coordinates warm introductions through Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins' networks. The careers page carries a Fast Company Best Workplaces for Innovators 2026 badge, and Traversal appears in Redpoint's InfraRed report and Paraform's Talent Density Index.

Traversal names three values on its careers page. Long-Term Thinking: "We're willing to invest more effort today if it leads to a better result tomorrow. We optimize for what lasts, not what looks good this quarter." Low Ego, High Standards: "We tackle difficult problems and hold high standards, but we don't take ourselves too seriously. We challenge ideas, respect each other, and know there's always more to learn." Enjoying the Journey: "The work is intense, but that doesn't mean it can't be enjoyable. We eat lunch together, celebrate milestones, invite family into the office, and build relationships that extend beyond work."

Every posting repeats the same self-description: "We think long term, move quickly, and hold a high bar without taking ourselves too seriously" and "a collaborative, hard-working culture". The city is part of the identity. Cagatay Berilgen in Product: "There's a certain New York mindset of choosing the difficult path because it's worth it, and that fits Traversal perfectly." Leila Shevins in People and Ops on the early days: "The team has lunch together every day, people pick up projects of all sizes and really own them, and the energy is infectious."

Traversal's hiring process has five stages and a dedicated Talent contact throughout: an intro call about your background and interests, a team conversation with the hiring manager or a team lead about the day-to-day work, a role-specific deep dive "designed to understand how you think and work" and built to mirror the actual job, then an onsite of 4 to 6 hours at the New York office with a series of interviews and, for some roles, a presentation in your area of expertise. Candidates who are not local are flown in. The company says it aims to move quickly to an offer after the onsite.

What the postings screen for: engineering roles ask for 3+ years of backend or full-stack experience, Python and FastAPI, AWS with ECS or Kubernetes, Postgres and S3, plus comfort in an early team "with limited resources, shifting priorities, and minimal structure". Research roles want experiments that turn into product improvements and prior work shipping ML systems to production. Sales roles ask for 5+ years of enterprise SaaS sales in observability, infrastructure or developer tools; Regional Director roles 8+ years with 2 to 3 in leadership. Visa sponsorship is not mentioned on the careers page or in postings.