Staff Data 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, 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

Laurel’s infrastructure and security team is lovingly named the Time Owls, and they are out to make Laurel’s infrastructure more reliable, secure and easy to use. Our team builds and maintains tools that enable our engineers to work with AWS, Kubernetes and other services easily and safely. We contribute to all applications in the company, and act as both best practice advocates and policy enforcers.

We work closely with our AI engineers and data scientists, and this role will focus on both making sure their work can be fast, efficient, scalable and secure. If you are more interested in general infrastructure than data stuff, please check out our Platform Engineering role.

Responsibilities

• Write Terraform modules and Go libraries other teams can use to manage their infrastructure.

• Work on Python API Services (Django) to improve the serving of our AI infrastructure.

• Improve Airflow DAGs and optimize MongoDB and Postgres usage.

• Develop and manage kubernetes, docker, and compute infrastructure for all of engineering.

• Improve continuous integration, continuous deployment, and other automation.

• Participate in an oncall rotation.

• Help teams improve their reliability, security and observability through documentation, pull requests and developing tooling.

• Work with vendors, engineers and others to improve the cost efficiency of our services.

• Write backend code to help teams deliver functionality when there are deadlines or lack of resources.

• Attend quarterly offsites (required travel), team standups, and other company meetings.

• Raise the bar for quality and advocate to make our engineering best practices.

What We're Looking For

The following are our non-negotiables for candidates.

• 6+ years of experience in the following areas:

• A developer with strong Python skills building and deploying APIs to support our AI team in delivering models to end users.

• Experience with Airflow, Kubernetes, AWS.

• Experience with Machine Learning and Large Language Models

• Development experience with Terraform.

• Experience working in startup environments

• Significant experience with Linux administration

• Experience with taking part in a regular engineering oncall rotation

• Experience with any CI tooling/platforms

• Experience with Postgresql and Mongodb

Nice to haves

The following are things that we are looking for in a standout candidate and would help make this role a perfect fit.

• Experience with Argo

• Experience with cdk8s

• Experience with Open Telemetry & Observe

• Experience with Spacelift

• Experience with CircleCI and/or GitHub Actions

• Experience with Typescript and Go

Flexibility and Logistics:

• Location: This role will be hybrid based out of our company hubs in either New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. We may consider exceptionally qualified remote candidates based in the United States or Canada.

• Additional Benefits: Comprehensive medical/dental/vision coverage with covered premiums, 401(k), and additional benefits including wellness/commuter/FSA stipends.

• Visa Sponsorship: Unfortunately we are unable to sponsor visas at this time.

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!