Applied AI Engineer

About this role

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 can 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 to 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

Similar jobs

• Applied AI Engineer — Openrouter · Remote
• Applied AI Engineer — Nevis · New York
• Applied AI Engineer — Luminai · SF Bay Area
• Applied AI Engineer — Materialbank · Remote
• Applied AI Engineer — Serval · San Francisco
• Applied AI Engineer — Tulip · Somerville, MA
• Applied AI Engineer — Rillet · San Francisco
• Applied AI Engineer — Ramp · New York, NY (HQ)