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Salary: USD 272,000 - 355,000 / annual
Harvey is an AI platform transforming legal and professional services by combining frontier agentic AI, enterprise-grade infrastructure, and deep domain expertise. The company has strong product-market fit, world-class investor backing, and is scaling rapidly.
You will lead the Backend Platform team, which owns the shared foundations that all product engineers depend on—frameworks, libraries, core abstractions, database access patterns, caching, request handling, observability, and context propagation. This is a technical leadership role where your decisions compound across the entire engineering organization.
Key responsibilities include:
- Lead and grow the Backend Platform team: hire, coach, and retain exceptional engineers with clear ownership and meaningful technical challenges.
- Define the platform's technical vision and roadmap by partnering with product teams to identify high-impact investments.
- Build next-generation backend foundations: design shared frameworks for database access, session management, caching, request handling, and streaming with clear interfaces and strong defaults.
- Scale Harvey's architecture by working with Infrastructure to evolve how applications use databases, replicas, and new storage systems.
- Build a data access layer enabling entities to move to new stores (KV, NoSQL) without product changes; make read replicas usable and offload high-volume data from the primary.
- Establish reliability patterns: load testing, circuit breakers, standard outbound clients with timeouts/retries/idempotency, and noisy-neighbor isolation.
- Embed security and reliability into the platform through partnership with Security and product teams on data handling, workspace isolation, and safeguards.
- Shape a codebase safe for both human and AI development: establish modular boundaries, enforceable contracts, and automated checks.
- Measure success through adoption, developer productivity, and the performance and reliability of products built on your work.
- Stay close to engineering: lead architecture discussions, review critical code, prototype when useful, and partner closely with Infrastructure, Developer Platform, Model Infrastructure, Security, and product engineering leaders.
Requirements:
- 10+ years of software engineering experience and 3+ years of engineering management experience with a track record of building strong teams and delivering complex backend or platform systems.
- Deep technical judgment in backend architecture and distributed systems, including database access patterns, concurrency, caching, API design, and performance.
- Experience building shared libraries, frameworks, or internal platforms adopted by multiple engineering teams; ability to balance useful abstractions with necessary flexibility.
- Technical depth to engage directly in design and code reviews, investigate difficult systems problems, and guide migrations across large, evolving codebases. Experience with Python and frameworks such as Flask or FastAPI is valuable.
- Track record of hiring, coaching, and developing engineers; ability to set clear expectations and create a culture of ownership and thoughtful execution.
- Strong product instincts for developer tools; ability to listen closely to engineers, understand where they lose time, and turn feedback into simpler, more effective ways to build.
- Experience embedding reliability, observability, and security into shared systems with measurable production improvements.
- Clear communication and ability to lead across team boundaries, align people on technical tradeoffs, and drive changes from design through rollout.
- Serious, hands-on use of AI coding agents and opinions on what makes a codebase safe for them to work in.
About Harvey
Legal / Compliance / Risk; AI / Data / Infrastructure — AI platform for legal and professional services work.
