Applied AI Engineer

Laurel; San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York (CA, CA, NY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Laurel is seeking an experienced Applied AI Engineer to advance our AI from promising to dependable in production. You will own features end-to-end and collaborate with product and platform teams to ship high-quality AI capabilities that matter to customers.

You will design evals, improve retrieval/embeddings, and shape the semantic stack with focus on reliable performance across the platform.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS/engineering or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering, with ML/LLM in production.
• Think in problems, not just solutions.
• Strong Python/TypeScript skills; comfortable with Node.js/NestJS and MongoDB.

Responsibilities

• Own AI features end-to-end from problem to GA with metrics.
• Move features through prototype to GA with evaluation baselines.
• Build and defend evals, golden datasets, and success metrics.
• Lead the meaning layer of the semantic stack with others.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

Node.js

NestJS

MongoDB

AI tooling

Problem solving

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS, Engineering, or related field or equivalent

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Copilot

Job description

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.

Senior / Staff Applied AI Engineer

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 are looking for a highly experienced Applied AI Engineer to take Laurel's core AI from promising to dependable. We're hiring this role at the Senior or Staff level — scope, title, and compensation will match your experience. Laurel already turns raw work activity into the concepts professionals actually think in — matters, tasks, narratives, work codes — in production today. Your charter is to make those features something a firm can trust: suggestions people accept, coverage across the whole working day, and consistency at the firm level. That dependability is the engine of Laurel's growth.

You’ll own AI features end-to-end — in the room at the problem statement, not the solution review — and you’ll be measured on output quality you can prove, not vibes. You’ll work on a charter to solve high-level business challenges with a collaborative, cross-functional team. Your curiosity will serve you well in asking the right questions to understand the customer problems we’re solving. 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 Applied AI Engineer at Laurel, you’ll stand 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 AI features end-to-end, from problem statement to GA — initiative classification, narratives, work codes, daily themes, compliance, and vision extraction (Prism)

• Move features through our rollout tiers (prototype → design partner → beta → GA), earning each promotion with an eval baseline and a capacity plan

• Build and defend evals: golden datasets, a north-star metric per feature, and online monitoring — so we see and prove how a feature behaves, not guess

• Lead the "meaning" layer of our semantic stack: retrieval semantics, embedding quality (proven first on initiative-candidate retrieval), and the label flywheel that feeds prompt optimization and golden sets. You co-design our vector and knowledge-graph stores with the AI Platform team — you're their most demanding customer

• Push output quality with the levers that matter: context assembly, prompt optimization, and per-customer/per-firm generation

• Work closely with cross-functional teams — product managers, designers, and other engineers — to gather requirements, define measures of success, and deliver high-quality solutions

• We want you not just to build but engage with our product and our users. Your input and opinion will be highly valuable, and it is expected that you have many thoughts on how things should be done and why

Teammates:

You will sit on Laurel's AI team and embed with the product “pod” where AI is load-bearing. Each pod is assigned an area of focus related to customer needs and our product offering, and typically has 4-7 members. Alongside embedded product work, the AI team protects dedicated capacity for foundational bets.

Your work is not silo’d to the pod, however. You are expected to work with all engineers at the company in some capacity, as needed — especially the AI Platform team, whose paved road you build on. Good communication skills are essential.

You will be a great fit if you have:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including a track record of shipping ML/LLM-powered features to production and owning their quality

• You think in problems, not solutions — you can take a half-formed prototype and find the real customer problem behind it

• Have deep knowledge and understanding, as well as strongly-held opinions about some of the below areas (or similar). We want to hear your thoughts on best practices, patterns, failure modes, and how you consistently ship AI features of the highest quality. What would you teach our other engineers? What has bitten you in the past?

  • LLM application engineering: prompting, structured outputs, retrieval/context assembly (RAG), agentic workflows

  • Evaluation: golden datasets, offline harnesses and online monitoring, north-star metrics — measuring quality rather than eyeballing it

  • Retrieval & embeddings: vector search, semantic retrieval quality, and the data/label flywheel that improves it

  • Languages & stack: strong in Python and/or TypeScript; comfortable across a modern backend (Node.js / NestJS, MongoDB, message queues) — nice to have given our stack

• You use AI coding tools fluently in your daily work (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, agentic coding) and have a point of view on where they accelerate real engineering and where they don't

• 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, as this is an important part of working at Laurel

• 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

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively in a team-oriented environment

• A customer mindset with proven ability to engage with customers and understand their needs

Flexibility and Logistics

• Visa Sponsorship: Requests for Visa sponsorship will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis