Harvey - Senior Engineering Manager, Backend Platform
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. You know how to balance a useful abstraction with the flexibility its users need. • The technical depth to engage directly in design and code reviews, investigate difficult systems problems, and guide migrations across a large, evolving codebase. Experience with Python and frameworks such as Flask or FastAPI is valuable. • A track record of hiring, coaching, and developing engineers, setting clear expectations, and creating a culture of ownership and thoughtful execution. • Strong product instincts for developer tools. You listen closely to engineers, understand where they lose time, and turn that feedback into simpler, more effective ways to build. • Experience embedding reliability, observability, and security into shared systems, with measurable improvements in production. • Clear communication and the 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.
Responsibilities
• Lead and grow the Backend Platform team. Hire, coach, and retain exceptional engineers, giving them clear ownership, meaningful technical challenges, and room to grow. • Lead and grow the Backend Platform team. • Define the platform’s technical vision and roadmap. Partner with product engineering teams to understand their hardest problems, identify the investments with the broadest impact, and deliver improvements they can feel in their daily work. • Define the platform’s technical vision and roadmap. • Build the next generation of Harvey’s backend foundations. Guide the design of shared frameworks for database access, session management, caching, request handling, and streaming—with clear interfaces and strong defaults. • Build the next generation of Harvey’s backend foundations. • Help Harvey scale through better architecture. Work with Infrastructure to evolve how applications use databases, replicas, and new storage systems, making those capabilities accessible without requiring every product team to solve the same problems. • Help Harvey scale through better architecture. • Scale the data layer. Build a data access layer so an entity can move to a new store (KV, NoSQL) without product changes. Make read replicas usable and move high-volume data off the primary. • Scale the data layer. • Make failure boring. Load test until “what happens at 3x?” has a real answer. Add circuit breakers, a standard outbound client with timeouts, retries and idempotency, and noisy-neighbor isolation, so one workspace or one slow vendor can’t take down the platform. • Make failure boring. • Make security and reliability properties of the platform. Partner with Security and product teams on safe handling of customer data, workspace isolation, and safeguards that prevent recurring failure patterns before code reaches production. • Make security and reliability properties of the platform. • Shape a codebase that humans and AI can build in confidently. Establish modular boundaries, enforceable contracts, and automated checks that make changes easier to reason about, review, and ship. • Shape a codebase that humans and AI can build in confidently. • Turn platform improvements into customer impact. Reduce latency, improve observability, and make production issues easier to diagnose. Measure success through adoption, developer productivity, and the performance and reliability of the products built on your work. • Turn platform improvements into customer impact. • Stay close to the engineering. Lead architecture discussions, review critical code, prototype when useful, and help engineers navigate difficult tradeoffs. Partner closely with Infrastructure, Developer Platform, Model Infrastructure, Security, and product engineering leaders to carry changes through to adoption. • Stay close to the engineering.
Benefits
• $272K – $355K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus • Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in our equity plan and benefits program. Benefits include, but not limited to: Comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits (401k match up to 4%), and flexible PTO. • At Harvey, we’re transforming how legal and professional services operate. By combining frontier agentic AI, an enterprise-grade platform, and deep domain expertise, we’re reshaping how critical knowledge work gets done for decades to come. • This is a rare chance to help build a generational company at a true inflection point. We have strong product-market fit and world-class investor support. We’re scaling fast and defining a new category in real time. The work is ambitious, the bar is high, and the opportunity for growth — personal, professional, and financial — is unmatched. • Our team moves fast, takes ownership, and is deeply committed to the mission — operating with intensity, staying close to our customers, and pushing each other for excellence. We live by three values: Decisiveness, Simplicity, and Job's Not Finished. We act quickly on clear judgment over perfect information, we believe simplicity is what scales, and we're never satisfied with where we are. If you want to do the best work of your career alongside people who share that drive, we'd love to build with you. • At Harvey, the future of professional services is being written today — and we’re just getting started. • $272,000 - $355,000 USD • Depending on your location, an Applicant Privacy Notice may apply to you. You can find all of our Applicant Privacy Notices here. • Depending on your location, an Applicant Privacy Notice may apply to you. You can find all of our Applicant Privacy Notices
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