Staff Platform Engineer
Laurel
Laurel’s Mission to Return Time:
We’re a team that is connected by time. Life has taught us its true value and finite nature. We value every minute and are on a mission to return time. And we live and breathe that mission in everything we do — from how we build our product that saves our customers time to how we operate as a company.
Come work with a team that’s intelligent yet humble, visionary yet gets things done. A team that’s only getting started at cracking a problem that affects every person who uses a screen to work.
Come build a company that will stand the test of time as we look to understand time itself.
We all waste a staggering amount of time at work (~33%) because we have no idea where we are spending it. Worse yet, we continue to operate in a factory model that simply does not apply to creative work. Our big bet is that by understanding time, we’ll be able to move away from it as a unit of value. In the future knowledge economy (lawyers, accountants, engineers), contributions will be assessed on value added, not the underlying time spent adding it.
Ambitious mission to say the least, so where are we starting? We have created a new market category called Time Automation that automates the timekeeping process for professionals and allows us to collect time data at scale. Before Laurel, professionals had to manually record every six minutes of their day into antiquated timekeeping software. Not anymore. We are moving away from a world in which humans tell a machine what they did at work, to our version of the world in which the machine tells the human.
We are looking for individuals who share our passion of returning time. Come join us on our journey as we spend time solving time. It will be a long road but if we’re even half right, we’ll change the way work is measured and performed forever.
About Laurel & Roadmap:
Laurel is the first company to apply AI to tracking time.
Phase 1 (today):
- Applying AI to automate timesheets for professional services. Value is: (1) more money for the firm and (2) less time for the user
Phase 2 (2025):
- Aggregating time data and moving pro serv industries from selling time → selling outcomes (rewiring the incentive model for 20% of Global GDP)
Phase 3: (2030):
- Tie outcomes back to the input of time across all digital industries–and leverage our work data set to automate work that does not create leverage
Traction:
Series B ($55M raised from top-flight investors). Rebuilt platform E2E post Series B raise which launched in Q1 2023. In just <22 months, we’ll have gone from $0 → +$10M ARR on the new platform (including significant ARR from upsells because of the new platform). Customer quote: “Laurel is the product I’ve been hoping for since I started practicing.”
Why Now?
AI will fundamentally change the nature of work, and how we think about work. This role at Laurel has the capacity to influence all knowledge work with the work data we have at our fingertips. You can stand at the forefront of this revolution and help change the meaning of work.
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. This person will have significant autonomy and authority in ensuring that the path we are taking ultimately yields our lofty goals of changing the way professional service workers work (and get paid). We can’t wait to grow Laurel with you.
About the Role
Laurel’s infrastructure 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.
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.
- 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:
- 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.
- Development experience with Terraform, Go and Typescript.
- Experience working in startup environments
- Significant experience with Linux administration
- Familiarity with Git
- Experience with taking part in a regular engineering oncall rotation
- Experience with any CI tooling/platforms
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 & Sumologic
- Experience with MongoDB
- Experience with Spacelift
- Experience with CircleCI and/or GitHub Actions
- Experience with PostgreSQL
- Experience with Machine Learning and Large Language Models
Flexibility and Logistics:
- Location: This role will be remote, but preference is to be based near our company hubs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York City.
- 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.
- 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.
Not sure if you meet the qualifications? Keep reading…
At Laurel, we welcome diverse perspectives and people who think rigorously and aren't afraid to challenge the status quo. If you’re interested in joining us on our mission to return time, then we encourage you to apply, even if you don’t perfectly match every single bullet on the job description. We promise to review your application. Laurel is an equal opportunity employer, and we celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment, free from discrimination or harassment, for all employees.