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Staff Software Engineer, Backend Platform

Harvey· Engineering
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Hybrid (San Francisco), Hybrid (New York)$200k - $260kFull-timePosted 9mo ago

About the role

Backend Platform Engineer role focused on building and operating Harvey’s cohesive backend platform, creating shared frameworks and libraries to improve developer experience, reliability, and performance across teams.

Responsibilities

  • Develop and maintain Harvey’s internal backend frameworks and libraries that provide common capabilities (API routing, service lifecycle management, caching and messaging primitives, error handling interfaces, etc.), so product teams don’t have to reinvent them
  • Create and improve APIs, service templates, and versioned interfaces that establish consistent patterns for building new services and features
  • Introduce and champion modern backend architecture patterns like asynchronous I/O (asyncio) and streaming data processing, continually evolving our platform for better performance and scalability
  • Design Harvey-specific abstractions and domain-specific frameworks—covering cross-cutting concerns (e.g., authorization, streaming) and areas like data governance and event processing—to provide product engineers with these capabilities out of the box
  • Embed reliability and observability into the platform by building in tracing, metrics, and automated tests (shift-left), ensuring services built on our foundation are robust and easy to monitor
  • Collaborate with Model Infrastructure team to tackle challenges unique to GenAI-native applications — such as supporting high-throughput model inference, managing streaming and long-running API interactions, and designing abstractions for retrieval, context handling, and prompt lifecycle
  • Collaborate with the Developer Experience and Infrastructure teams (who own CI/CD pipelines, build tools, and release infrastructure) to integrate our platform components seamlessly into the deployment and monitoring ecosystem
  • Work closely with product engineering teams to gather feedback, evangelize best practices, and make the “paved road” approach a reality — providing strong defaults and clear documentation so teams can move fast with confidence

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of software engineering experience (post-BS/MS), including building scalable backend systems or internal developer platforms
  • Proficiency in Python (or similar languages) and deep knowledge of backend development fundamentals (APIs, data stores, concurrency, distributed systems)
  • Hands-on experience with web frameworks and service architectures (e.g. Flask/FastAPI, Bounded context services, microservices) and an understanding of designing clean, versioned APIs
  • Familiarity with caching, messaging, and database technologies (Redis, Kafka, SQL/NoSQL databases, Vector databases, etc.) and how to use them effectively for high performance and reliability
  • A track record of writing high-quality, well-tested code and using tools (unit/integration testing, static typing, CI) to catch issues early and ensure reliability
  • Strong problem-solving skills and a passion for improving developer experience — you enjoy creating tools or frameworks that make other engineers more productive
  • Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work across teams and incorporate feedback
  • Experience contributing to or maintaining internal libraries/frameworks is a plus

Skills

Required:PythonAPI designAsynchronous I/ODistributed systemsCaching and messaging

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage
  • Retirement benefits (401k match up to 4%)
  • Flexible PTO
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Harvey

Professional Class AI

Harvey is a platform built to meet the standards of the world’s leading professional service firms.

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