Role Overview

Harvey is transforming how legal and professional services work gets done. As AI moves from answering questions to carrying out complex workflows, the engineering challenge expands: every interaction depends on systems that can handle sensitive data, stream results, coordinate work, and stay fast and reliable under growing demand. Backend Platform builds the shared foundations that make this possible.

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the team shaping how backend software is built at Harvey. Your team owns the frameworks, libraries, and core abstractions that product engineers use every day—from database access and caching to request handling, observability, and safe context propagation. A better abstraction here can accelerate every product team. A stronger default can prevent an entire class of production failures. The impact of your decisions compounds across the engineering organization.

The next chapter is especially compelling. As both engineers and coding agents contribute more software, we need a platform that makes the right patterns easy to use and the wrong ones difficult to introduce. You’ll help define that foundation: clear architectural boundaries, reusable building blocks, and automated safeguards that let teams ship with confidence. You’ll tackle deep systems problems while building an engineering experience people love.

This is a technical leadership role with room to shape both the platform and the team. You’ll hire and develop exceptional engineers, set the technical direction, and stay close to architecture and code. If you enjoy turning hard, recurring problems into simple tools that make everyone around you more effective, this is an opportunity to do it at the center of Harvey’s growth.

What You'll Do

• Lead and grow the Backend Platform team. Hire, coach, and retain exceptional engineers, giving them clear ownership, meaningful technical challenges, and room to grow.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

What You Have

• 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.

Compensation

$272,000 - $355,000 USD

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