Principal Platform Architect

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

As a Principal Platform Architect at Traversal, you’ll set the technical direction for some of the most critical systems in our stack—observability infrastructure, large-scale data pipelines, and agentic AI workflows. You’ll be responsible for evaluating and evolving our current architecture, helping us scale both technically and organizationally as we push the boundaries of how we collect, process, and act on telemetry data.

You’ll work cross-functionally with engineering leadership, AI researchers, and product teams to design systems that are resilient, observable, and performant—enabling our platform to reason through production incidents in real time. This is a highly strategic and hands-on role for someone who thrives at the intersection of deep systems thinking, long-term technical vision, and real-world debugging. You'll help shape not only the architecture but also the engineering culture and technical bar across the company. 

Responsibilities

• Architecture & System Design: Lead the design of scalable, resilient infrastructure systems to power AI-driven root cause analysis and observability workflows.

• Architect for scale and complexity: Define and evolve the long-term architecture strategy for infrastructure and observability systems—ensuring they scale with growing AI workloads, customer complexity, and team size.

• Drive cross-functional technical alignment: Act as a key partner to product and engineering leadership—aligning on priorities, shaping the roadmap, and driving clarity across teams.

• Lead through ambiguity and depth: Tackle high-leverage, unscoped problems—bringing structure, clarity, and executable plans to ambiguous technical challenges.

• Set engineering standards: Establish and evangelize best practices across reliability, system design, code quality, and observability—raising the bar for engineering across the org.

• Influence organizational process: Partner with leadership to improve how technical decisions are made, how teams collaborate, and how we scale culture alongside systems.

• Mentor deeply and broadly: Uplevel Staff and Senior engineers across the company, not just on your immediate team—through pairing, feedback, and technical guidance.

• Shape team composition and hiring bar: Work with recruiting and leadership to define role expectations, calibrate interviews, and evaluate candidates for high-impact roles.

• Be a technical multiplier: Serve as a sounding board for critical architectural decisions, unlock velocity by unblocking teams, and help connect long-term vision with day-to-day execution.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or platform engineering, with a strong emphasis on large-scale data systems.

• Proven expertise in designing, scaling, and operating high-throughput distributed systems for real-time or near real-time data processing.

• Demonstrated success owning complex infrastructure architecture end-to-end—from initial design through to deployment and long-term maintenance.

• Deep understanding of data pipeline design patterns (streaming and batch), storage systems, and consistency/performance tradeoffs at scale.

• Hands-on experience with technologies like Kafka, Flink, Spark, Postgres, S3, and modern observability stacks.

• Experience architecting for multi-tenant, hybrid, or on-prem environments.

• Strong systems thinking and debugging skills across infrastructure, networking, and data layers.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills with a track record of driving alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Comfortable working in high-velocity, ambiguous startup environments, with a bias toward action and pragmatism.

Nice to Have

• Experience making software systems observable using logs, metrics, and traces.

• Familiarity with Python-based ecosystems.

• Background in infrastructure for ML/AI or LLM-powered products.

• Experience provisioning and managing infrastructure using IaC tools (Terraform, Pulumi).

• Contributions to open source or infrastructure tooling.

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–$500,000, 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.