Where cutting-edge AI research meets world-class engineering Troubleshooting production incidents is perhaps the most demanding problem in the software engineering lifecycle – you have to search through petabytes of data, most of it is noise, and every incident is different.
Cofounder Ahmed Lone Traversal was formerly known as Interaction Labs Traversal is applying Elasticsearch in one of the most innovative ways we've seen as it relates to AI agents. Their agentic architecture combined with Elasticsearch enables Traversal AI to autonomously search petabytes of telemetry data efficiently and at scale in mission-critical enterprise environments, unlocking a totally new paradigm for troubleshooting production incidents and software reliability more broadly.” —
Shay Bannon Founder & CTO, Elastic Traversal is blazing the path for the future of AI Agents. Their approach to developing a swarm of expert on-call engineers to quickly identify and remediate production issues in mission-critical systems stands out among the most forward-thinking and practical methods for agent development. Furthermore, as an ambient agent system, their product is ever-present and constantly improving the lives of engineers. I’m eager to see how Traversal continues to evolve, and how the broader industry builds upon the foundation they are laying." —
Harrison Chase CEO & Cofounder of LangChain
Meet the team building Traversal – and learn what brought them here.
What is the worst incident you handled before Traversal?
At a high-frequency trading firm, our systems suddenly halted and internal tools froze. After digging through logs, we traced it to a multithreaded script that wouldn’t die, overloading everything. Once we got back in, we discovered someone had swapped a price field with a UUID in a config, making the system think we had trillions of dollars of risk and forcing an emergency shutdown. A fun two hours that probably took six years off my life.
Ali Soyupak
Member of Technical Staff
What is the worst incident you handled before Traversal?
Someone introduced a typo in a new index months earlier. The query patterns it was meant to support brought down the entire database during a high-traffic week, once the table had grown to millions of records.
Andres Soto
Member of Technical Staff
Why did you join Traversal?
I joined Traversal for a few reasons: one, a world-class team of no-ego, good-hearted people; two, debugging complex systems is a universal pain point that LLMs are well-suited to solve; and three, as the cost of writing code drops, the need for AI tools to resolve issues will only grow.
Andrew Rubinstein
Member of Technical Staff
What is the worst incident you handled before Traversal?
I spent half a day tearing apart the C++ core of a Python C-extension, convinced the algorithm was broken. The real culprit? I had mis-parsed the PyArg tuple in the wrapper. Face-palm moment.
Anish Agarwal
CEO & Cofounder
What is the worst incident you handled before Traversal?
The day before the NeurIPS submission deadline, I found a bug in a math proof that was crucial to the paper’s central argument. It took the whole day and night to find a fix but we made the deadline with 30 minutes to spare, and many more grey hairs!
Ben Altschuler
Member of Technical Staff
What is the worst incident you handled before Traversal?
While working at an e-bike lock company, our GPS-enabled locks performed well during testing in California but failed in a deployment in Utah. The satellites we used had coverage in California — but not Utah.
Brandon Crisp
Member of Technical Staff
Why did you join Traversal?
SRE is a high-context space. Onboarding takes time, and building a culture that supports distributed workloads is tough. I joined Traversal because it’s a winning team solving a problem I’ve seen firsthand — again and again.
Brandon Kwintner
Member of Technical Staff
What is the worst incident you handled before Traversal?
We had a major client demo for a beta feature launching later that month. Just hours before, we noticed dropped websocket messages were corrupting JSON and crashing the app. I dug into React’s state hook logic and realized updates were coming in too fast to handle sequentially. We rewrote the streaming logic with a reducer hook and got everything back online — with less than 10 minutes to spare.
Carlo Ruiz
Member of Technical Staff
Why did you join Traversal?
Software engineering has three technical functions: writing docs, writing code, and debugging systems. There are currently AI services for the first two — but not the third. Traversal will be a new industry standard.
Charlie Weston
Member of Technical Staff
What is your favorite thing about Traversal?
The team’s unmatched candor, craftsmanship, and passion for building is cathartic; everyone cares as much about how things get done as what gets done.
Chloe Hauenstein
GTM & Operations
What is your favorite thing about Traversal?
Traversal manages to strike a rare balance between intensity and levity – each day feels like real momentum toward shaping an industry, but the team still makes space to have fun and joke around. It’s one of the first jobs where I actively want to come into the office each day.
Danny Michell
GTM & Operations
Why did you join Traversal?
The people, the hard problems we're tackling, the mission, and the incredible growth potential.
Divyansh Agarwal
Member of Technical Staff
Why did you join Traversal?
I joined Traversal because it has a phenomenal team and a mission that truly resonates with me - transforming observability in a meaningful, high-impact way.
Eric Schwartz
Member of Technical Staff
Why did you join Traversal?
In my last role, I worked on observability and we were actively exploring how to automate root cause analysis — but could never quite figure it out. So when I heard about Traversal, I was immediately excited by both the product and the opportunity. Then, during the interview process, I was struck by how smart and kind the team was, and knew I wanted to be a part of it.
Ike Kilinc
Member of Technical Staff
What is your favorite thing about Traversal?
We’ve built a place where good people can find meaning — where deep passion, humility, and humor collide to craft a tool so beloved that engineers will wonder how they ever built without it. Together, we’re quietly shaping something the world truly needs, wants, and values.
Jayant Madugula
Member of Technical Staff
What is the worst incident you handled before Traversal?
At my first internship, I debugged an iOS app that let multiple users update shared documents. A simple bug-fix ticket quickly spiraled into a network race condition that required simulating multi-user actions second-by-second to fully understand and fix!
Karim Itani
Member of Technical Staff
What is the worst incident you handled before Traversal?
I was integrating with an external service that seemed to use a queue under the hood. At one point, they had network issues — every request went through, but every response returned as a failure. Since our integration depended on accurate success/failure reporting, it took us far too long to realize the issue wasn’t on our side, but theirs.
Leila Shevins
GTM & Operations
What is your favorite thing about Traversal?
Not only is Traversal building something category-defining, but the team working on this challenge is easily the kindest, hardest working team I've been around.
Matt Schoenbauer
Member of Technical Staff
What is the worst incident you handled before Traversal?
An update to DNS internal records for a service used in nearly every backend API call didn’t include a necessary trailing dot, resulting in a broken CNAME which took down dashboards, observability, and CI/CD.
Nitsan Shai
Member of Technical Staff
Why did you join Traversal?
I saw a very smart and motivated team, working on a problem that haunts all software engineers, with an approach that adds a ton of value. It was an opportunity I couldn't turn down.
Olivier Gabison
Member of Technical Staff
What is your favorite thing about Traversal?
The team's passion for building a world-class product is contagious and creates momentum you can feel every day.
Pranav Sriram
Member of Technical Staff
What is the worst incident you handled before Traversal?
While at an AI chip company, debugging often meant manually inspecting register files that defined program state for nearly a million cores. If you’ve ever stared at a stack trace — imagine that, times a million (literally).
Prashanthi Ramachandran
Member of Technical Staff
What is the worst incident you handled before Traversal?
While adding a chat modal to a client’s e-commerce site, the widget wouldn’t show despite countless attempts. As a last resort, we cleared the site’s cache — and accidentally took down the whole site during peak sales hours. The widget had been there all along, just buried under the page thanks to a rogue z-index.
What is the worst incident you handled before Traversal?
While working for a wireless networking provider, we spent days debugging intermittent mobile connectivity for our largest account, a major social media customer. Their employees were consistently losing access during morning commutes on the company shuttle – and the customer threatened to cancel the contract. We ran RF diagnostics, checked handover logs, and re-provisioned SIM profiles – only to discover they had pushed a DNS configuration that filtered out a large subset of domains.
What is the worst incident you handled before Traversal?
I once spent a month debugging a research method implementation because the results never matched my test cases. It turned out I was inverting a matrix that was very sensitive to numerical imprecision, so I had to implement a custom conjugate gradient solver to fix it – and open-sourced the implementation.
Ryan Huang
Member of Technical Staff
What is the worst incident you handled before Traversal?
I was woken up at 6am on a Sunday because an entire region of our large messaging platform showed an elevated error rate. Our load test — which determined how many resources to allocate — had been misconfigured, but the issue only surfaced due to natural traffic growth.
Sacha Guyon
Member of Technical Staff
What is the worst incident you handled before Traversal?
At an event app startup, we tested our live Q&A feature with five users — then launched it the next day to 500 people interacting with the customer’s CEO on stage. It crashed immediately. The presentation paused, and we had five minutes to fix it while sitting in the audience, pretending everything was under control.
Slava Sivov
Member of Technical Staff
Why did you join Traversal?
As someone who’s spent my entire career building software health ecosystems, I was thrilled to join Traversal and be at the forefront of observability AI — helping save millions of debugging hours for developers worldwide.
