Platform Engineer

About the role

As a Senior Platform Engineer at Laurel on the Foundational Engineering team, you will design and build the foundational infrastructure and systems that power our internal developer platform and production environments. You’ll be responsible for ensuring the high availability, scalability, and security of our core services, enabling our engineering teams to ship products rapidly and reliably. You’ll work with engineers and non-technical functions alike, identifying performance and reliability optimizations, solving complex distributed systems problems, and establishing technical and operational patterns that all engineers will leverage to build both Laurel and internal tooling. You’ll get to use cutting-edge technologies across multiple clouds, the latest models from frontier labs, and contribute across the stack. This role works closely with Security, our Developer Productivity, and our Data Infrastructure teams, alongside our other product-focused engineering teams.

You should be excited by questions like:

• How do we measure performance of increasingly complex, opaque, and non-deterministic systems?
• How do we decide what tradeoffs to make across cost, speed, and quality?
• How do we ensure reliability and performance in a world where writing code is cheap?
• How can we enable experimentation in development, and provide confidence in production?
• How can we ensure that requests from one side of the globe to the other don’t impact the user experience?

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain robust, scalable, and secure infrastructure systems that support our growing AI-driven platform.
• Manage and optimize our cloud infrastructure (AWS and Azure) and container orchestration (Kubernetes), as well as our Identity, Configuration, Routing, and Auditing services.
• Build and maintain high-performance CI/CD pipelines to increase deployment frequency, security, and reliability.
• Implement comprehensive observability, monitoring, and alerting to maintain system health and establish patterns for on-call and incident response across the organization.
• Partner with engineering teams to diagnose performance bottlenecks and optimize cost-efficiency.
• Develop internal tooling to automate infrastructure provisioning/management and streamline development.
• Stay current with industry trends and adopt emerging technologies.

Requirements

We’re looking for engineers who combine strong technical fundamentals with exceptional ownership and execution. You may be a fit if you:

• Have 4+ years of experience in Platform, Infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps roles.
• Can independently architect and ship complex systems with minimal oversight.
• Have deep experience with APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and data-intensive applications.
• Thrive in ambiguous environments where requirements evolve quickly.
• Can communicate clearly with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Care deeply about speed, iteration, and customer impact.

The following are non-negotiable requirements:

• Experience with Kubernetes and 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 on-call rotation.
• Experience with any CI tooling/platforms and build systems.
• Experience debugging production issues in unfamiliar codebases with logs, metrics, and tracing.

Nice to haves

• Experience deploying AI systems into enterprise environments.
• Software engineer shaped, with a systems engineering background.
• Experience with our specific technology stack: Argo, cdk8s, OpenTelemetry & Observe, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Spacelift, CircleCI, and/or GitHub Actions.
• Familiarity with authentication systems, security constraints, and enterprise IT environments.

What Success Looks Like

• Earn deep trust with engineering teams through reliability and technical credibility.
• Create reusable technical patterns that improve the core platform, deferring to existing patterns that accelerate development while also being able to point out when existing systems don’t quite satisfy the requirements.
• Bring clarity to ambiguous problems.
• Operate with urgency while maintaining strong engineering judgment.
• Leave systems in a maintainable, scalable state.
• Enjoy teaching and sharing knowledge with others to decrease dependency on the infrastructure team.

Why This Role Matters

At Laurel, we believe the best enterprise software comes from engineers working directly with real customer problems. The foundational infrastructure you build shapes our roadmap, platform architecture, and our ability to scale. This role is ideal for engineers who want to build hard technical problems with real-world constraints and see the direct impact of their work.

An engineer in this role would:

• Iterate on foundational patterns for our infrastructure and advise teams who require specific solutions.
• Work on systems engineering problems, such as complex networking via a Golang-based “edge router” and orchestrating canary deployments.
• Optimize performance, cost, and reliability of both infrastructure and services.

Schedule

This role will be remote, but preference is given to candidates based near our company hubs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York City.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with covered premiums.
• 401(k) retirement plan.
• Wellness, commuter, and FSA stipends.
• Bi-annual, in-person company off-sites in unique locations.
• Equity and additional employee benefits.
• Flexible time off for sickness or personal needs.

Pay

Compensation Range: $224K - $267K

About Laurel

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.

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.