Staff Backend Engineer (Digital Foot Print)

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 an experienced Staff Software Engineer to join our team. You’ll have a direct impact on engineering practices throughout our backend stack and are expected to raise the bar for the engineers around you. As a Software Engineer, you will 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. Your ability to learn quickly, write, and design quality software will serve you well in delivering value to our customers incrementally. 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 a Software 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

• Architect and Develop: Design, build, and maintain efficient, reusable, and extremely reliable code across our backend components of our applications.

• Collaborate: Work closely with cross-functional teams, including product managers, designers, and other engineers, to gather requirements, define technical specifications and measures of success, and deliver high-quality software solutions.

• Optimize: Identify bottlenecks and bugs, and devise solutions to mitigate and address these issues. Continuously improve performance, scalability, and security of our applications.

• Mentor: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior developers, fostering a culture of learning and growth within the team.

• Innovate: Stay up-to-date with the latest industry trends and technologies, and proactively suggest improvements and new features to enhance our products.

• Test and Deploy: Implement automated testing and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to ensure robust and reliable software releases.

• Work with Product and Customer Success teams to flesh out business requirements and designs for those requirements and systems

• Participate in an on call rotation.

• Connect: 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

This role will report to the Manager of Digital Footprint Team and work alongside our Engineering team members.

Skills and Experience

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

• Experience: 6+ years of professional experience in Backend Software development. Full Stack knowledge is a plus. Ideal candidates will have a solid understanding of modern web technologies and be comfortable working with large-scale data systems.

• Technical Skills:

  • We expect you to have deep knowledge and understanding, as well as strongly-held opinions about some of the below technologies (or similar). We want to hear your thoughts on best practices, patterns, code smells, ways to improve performance, etc. What things would you teach our other engineers? What has bitten you in the past? What things help you consistently deliver software that is of the highest quality, and why?

  • Backend:

    • Required: Strong understanding of Typescript, Node.js, messaging queues (ie. AWS SQS), MongoDB.

    • Nice to have: Experience with Python (Django, FastAPI, or Flask). Familiarity with Airflow, PostgreSQL and NestJS.

• 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.

• Customer Mindset: Proven ability to engage with customers and understand their needs.

• Domain Knowledge: Experience in AI is preferred.

Flexibility and Logistics:

Location: Hybrid in Los Angeles / San Francisco / New York, working Tuesday - Thursday in office. We will hire remote in the US / Canada for extraordinary candidates.

1. Compensation: Competitive salary, generous equity, comprehensive medical/dental/vision coverage with covered premiums, 401(k), additional benefits including wellness/commuter/FSA stipends.

2. 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.

What Laurel is

Laurel is building the system of record for human and agentic work.

The trust Laurel has built with regulated enterprises—and, even more importantly, their end-users— has enabled it to be the first company ever to deploy a multimodal desktop agent at scale (45K+ professionals and 70+ countries). This enables Laurel to collect work that no one else has.

Half of enterprise work happens in systems with no API or OS-level access which no tech—other than a multimodal desktop agent—can capture.

Laurel collects more than just metadata; it captures the work itself. And to make the data useful, Laurel builds workflows that requires the professional who did the work to label it accurately, creating a reinforcement learning flywheel that nobody else in the world has.

The result is +2B (and counting) of human-verified labels, creating what is becoming the world’s largest repository of last-mile enterprise data and workflows.

How Laurel did it

Laurel developed its data infrastructure by creating the AI Billing category in professional services (legal, accounting, consulting). Laurel earned the trust of the enterprise (in the form of +$1B in profit returned) and end-users (in the form of 1.53M work hours returned) to collect all digital work, even work happening in digital systems that were previously invisible to AI.

Laurel is now re-running the same playbook in financial services (insurance, banks, private equity, etc). Same data infrastructure. But instead of billing, it is creating the Work Observability category to expand its feedback loop.

What’s next

Packaging its last-mile data in the form of:

• Post-training: an open-source model on Laurel’s data improved performance by 33%, matching the frontier, at 1% of the cost.

• Context: Feeding this data into a frontier model’s context window improves task automation by 21%.

• This is how Laurel accelerates its growth from 4x YoY (current) to +10x YoY).