Staff AI Engineer at Laurel

Laurel is on a mission to return time. As the leading AI Time platform for professional services firms, we’re transforming how organizations capture, analyze, and optimize their most valuable resource: time. Our proprietary machine learning technology automates work time capture and connects time data to business outcomes, enabling firms to increase profitability, improve client delivery, and make data-driven strategic decisions. We serve many of the world's largest accounting and law firms, including EY, Aprio, Crowell & Moring, and Frost Brown Todd, and process over 1 billion work activities annually that have never been collected and aggregated before Laurel’s AI Time platform. Our team comprises top talent in AI, product development, and engineering—innovative, humble, and forward-thinking professionals committed to redefining productivity in the knowledge economy. We're building solutions that empower workers to deliver twice the value in half the time, giving people more time to be creative and impactful. If you're passionate about transforming how people work and building a lasting company that explores the essence of time itself, we'd love to meet you. ABOUT THE ROLE We’re looking for a highly experienced AI Engineer who can shape how Laurel designs, builds, and ships AI solutions. You’ll work across the stack — from data pipelines to model‑powered product features — and raise the bar for everyone around you. This role is fit for those who thrive at the intersection of cutting‑edge AI development and production‑grade engineering. We are looking for someone who is motivated by turning real‑world data into incredible user experiences. Ownership comes from the ground up, we empower our teams to understand and make an impact on the business. AI will fundamentally change the nature of work and how we think about work. As an AI engineer at Laurel, you’ll have the capacity to understand and impact the experiences of our customers, standing at the forefront of the mission to return time to our customers. Laurel is at a pivot point. We've built a product that people like, and have a direction that people love, but it hasn't been done yet. WHAT YOU WILL DO: - Own business‑critical AI challenges. Partner with product, design, and engineers to uncover the real customer problems, then frame them as tractable machine‑learning tasks - Build end‑to‑end solutions, collect and curate data, prototype models, run rigorous experiments, and productionize the winners with reliable MLOps practices and your code will move effortlessly between exploratory notebooks and hardened services - Ship incrementally, learn rapidly, break ambitious ideas into testable slices, measure impact, and iterate - Elevate the team and mentor engineers on best practices in ML engineering, model evaluation, prompt design, and responsible AI - Introduce tools and techniques that improve reliability, speed of deployment, fairness, and performance - Take true ownership and empower every team member to understand the business levers behind their work and to push for outcomes, not just tickets - Have the autonomy to choose the right approach and the accountability for results - Aid in building out Laurel's AI platform to support billions of inferences TEAMMATES This role sits inside the AI engineering team, but your primary work will be supporting a “pod” with various other engineering disciplines. Each pod is assigned an area of focus related to customer needs and our product offering. Pods typically have 4-7 members. Your work is not siloed to the pod, however. AI engineers are expected to collaborate closely with other pods and broader engineering teams. YOU WILL BE A GREAT FIT IF YOU HAVE: - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience - 5+ years of professional experience in building production machine learning solutions, with a focus on NLP, language models, and embeddings - Curiosity that drives you to ask the right questions; pragmatism drives you to deliver value week over week - Strong proficiency in Python - Comfort with at least one deep‑learning framework such as PyTorch or TensorFlow - Hands-on experience building text-processing pipelines - Solid grasp of LLM evaluation metrics (BLEU, ROUGE, BERTScore, human preference scoring) - Strong SQL skills - Experience with cloud platforms (AWS and Azure) - Demonstrated MLOps experience - Orchestration and pipeline (Airflow) - Experiment tracking (MLFlow) - Containerization with Docker - Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to think critically and creatively - Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, team-oriented environment and manage multiple priorities - A customer mindset with proven ability to engage with customers and understand their needs - Have a proven history of early action and initiative, rather than waiting for direction, as this is an important part of working at Laurel NICE TO HAVE TECHNICAL SKILLS: - Developed a production-ready agent - Deployed a production MCP server - Comfort with infrastructure as code (terraform) - Developed or fine-tuned a custom embedding Flexibility and Logistics: - Location: The Ideal candidate will be available for hybrid work at our San Fransciso, Los Angeles, or New York office. Full remote options are available for exceptional candidates. - Visa Sponsorship: We will consider candidates who require Visa sponsorship on a case-by-case basis WHY JOIN LAUREL: - To date, we've secured significant funding from renowned venture capitalists (Google Ventures, IVP, Anthos, Upfront Ventures), as well as notable individuals like Marc Benioff, Gokul Rajaram, Kevin Weil, and Alexis Ohanian - A smart, fun, collaborative, and inclusive team - Great employee benefits, including equity and 401K - Bi-annual, in-person company off-sites, in unique locations, to grow and share time with the team - An opportunity to perform at your best while growing, making a meaningful impact on the company's trajectory, and embodying our core values: understanding your "why," dancing in the rain, being your whole self, and sanctifying time We encourage diverse perspectives and rigorous thinkers who aren't afraid to challenge the status quo. Laurel is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status. We are not able to support visa sponsorship or relocation assistance.  If you think you'd be a good fit for this role, we encourage you to apply, even if you don’t perfectly match all the bullet points in the job description. At Laurel, we strive to create an inclusive culture that encourages people from all walks of life to bring their unique, diverse perspectives to work. Every day, we aim to build an environment that empowers us all to do the best work of our careers, and we can't wait to show you what we have to offer!