About the Role

As a Productivity Engineer at Laurel, you'll design, build, and deploy AI-powered systems that multiply the effectiveness of our Engineering teams.

You'll work with engineers in many departments - Frontend, Backend, AI/ML, Infrastructure, and FDEs - to learn their workflows, find pain points, and improve processes to increase throughput quality and quantity.

You'll be testing the latest software development offerings from frontier labs, infrastructure providers, hyperscalers, and neoclouds, to find out what's worth adopting and how to fit it into our organization. Setting up the latest thing isn't enough - you'll need to understand tool capabilities, find the extensible edges, and build connective tissue. Given the high pace of this field, you can expect to work on a high volume of projects that get completed, released, and then re-architected a few months later.
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?
• What are the weak points at the edges of the best AI systems? What is AI likely to still be bad at next quarter, or next year?
• How do we measure the entire chain of value creation from our engineers to satisfied users? How do we accelerate every phase of that chain?
• How do we invest in projects we won't need to completely scrap in 6 months, when the tide of frontier models continues to rise?

What You'll Do:

• Work directly with Laureates and leadership to know what to measure, build, and buy.
• Interface with engineering teams to learn the many ways work happens at Laurel.
• Partner with teams and ICs to teach new tools, collect feedback and iterate.
• Designing systems which can be consumed equally by both human and agent users.
• Create new CI/CD pipelines for extreme throughput and agent interactivity.
• Work on multiple application platforms, both for our external product and internal usage.
• Be responsible for distribution and adoption; learning how to make tools people want to use.
• Collect feedback, through word of mouth and technical telemetry, to maintain situational awareness and iterate.
• Stay on top of industry news and trends in the fastest moving sector of technology; hone opinionated instincts on what to pursue and what to ignore.

What We're Looking For

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, DevEx, or DevOps roles
• Can independently architect and ship complex systems with minimal oversight
• Have experience with APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and data-intensive applications
• Experience building with agent primitives: Skills / MCPs / Hooks, SDKs, multi-agent systems, routing, context and cost management.
• Experience using configuration management tools like Nix / NixOS, homebrew, or MDM tools.
• 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 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. These are not requirements, but they tend to correlate strongly with success in this role:

• Startup experience or early-stage product building
• Experience deploying AI systems into enterprise environments
• Strong systems engineering or infrastructure background
• Experience integrating with third-party enterprise systems and APIs
• Familiarity with authentication systems, security constraints, and enterprise IT environments
• Experience debugging production issues in unfamiliar codebases
• History of shipping quickly under real-world constraints
• Comfort balancing rapid iteration with long-term engineering quality
• Experience with our specific technology stack: Argo, cdk8s, Open Telemetry & Observe, MongoDB and Postgresql, Spacelift, CircleCI and/or GitHub Actions

What Success Looks like

Successful Productivity Engineers at Laurel:

• Earn deep trust with engineers.
• Creating powerful tools users can extend themselves.
• Minimizing learning curves and adoptive friction by creating systems that are easy to interact with.
• Operate with urgency while maintaining strong engineering judgment.

Why This Role Matters

At Laurel, we believe we can multiply the power of the individual by arming them with the best possible tools. We do it externally for our users, and we do the same internally for our teammates. This role is ideal for engineers who want to:

• Build and ship constantly.
• Work on the cutting edge and use the newest, most advanced tools.
• Push new systems into a mature engineering org of nearly 100 people.
• Operate with high ownership and autonomy.
• See the direct impact of their work in production environments and company growth.
• Feel the AGI.

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.