Staff AI/ML Engineer
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, Grant Thornton, and Latham & Watkins, 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 / ML Engineer who can shape how Laurel designs, builds, and ships AI solutions. You’ll work across the stack — from data pipelines all the way to model‑powered product features — and raise the bar for everyone around you. This role is fit for those that 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.
Why Now?
AI will fundamentally change the nature of work, and how we think about work. As an AI / ML 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.
Core Duties
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. 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. Curiosity drives you to ask the right questions; pragmatism drives you to deliver value week over week.
Elevate the team. 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. We empower every team member to understand the business levers behind their work and to push for outcomes—not just tickets. You’ll have the autonomy to choose the right approach and the accountability for results.
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.
Skills and Experience
Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Experience: 5+ years of professional experience in building production machine learning solutions, with a focus on NLP, language models, and embeddings.
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Required Technical Skills:
Strong proficiency in Python
Comfort with at least one deep‑learning frameworks 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)
Comfort building with and utilizing language models
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Demonstrated MLOps experience
Orchestration and pipelines (Airflow)
Experiment tracking (MLFlow)
Containerization with Docker
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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
Ownership: We expect you to take ownership over our product and the parts of it that you’re responsible for. You should be invested and have a proven history of early action and initiative, rather than waiting for direction. This is an important part of working at Laurel.
Problem-Solving: Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to think critically and creatively. Ability to work in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and manage multiple priorities.
Communication: Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, team-oriented environment.
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Customer Mindset: Proven ability to engage with customers and understand their needs.
Flexibility and Logistics:
Location: Ideal candidate will be available for hybrid work in one of our company hubs (San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York). Full remote options are available for exceptional candidates.
Compensation: Competitive salary, generous equity, comprehensive medical/dental/vision coverage with covered premiums, 401(k), additional benefits including wellness/commuter/FSA stipends. For candidates located in New York, NY, San Francisco, CA, and Los Angeles, CA the range for this role is $190,000-$245,000 USD. Final compensation amounts will be determined based on several factors including candidate experience, technical qualifications, and education and may vary from the amounts listed.
Visa Sponsorship: Unfortunately we are unable to sponsor visas at this time.
What happens if my kid or I are sick on a workday? Take all the time you need! We’ll cover for you. And send you some soup.
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!