← All roles

Senior Engineering Manager, Backend Platform

Harvey· Engineering
Apply on company site
Hybrid (San Francisco)$272k - $355kFull-timePosted 5d ago

About the role

Engineering leadership role focused on building and governing Harvey's Backend Platform—the shared foundations, frameworks, and abstractions used by product engineers to access databases, handle requests, observe systems, and ensure safe context propagation at scale.

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.
  • Define the platform’s technical vision and roadmap. Partner with product engineering teams to understand their hardest problems, identify investments with broad impact, and deliver improvements they can feel in 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.

Qualifications

  • 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 abstraction with flexibility.
  • 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.
  • 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 and ability to translate engineer feedback into simpler, more effective workflows.
  • Experience embedding reliability, observability, and security into shared systems, with measurable production improvements.
  • Clear communication and ability to lead across team boundaries, align on technical tradeoffs, and drive changes from design through rollout.
  • Hands-on use of AI coding agents and opinions on what makes a codebase safe for them.

Skills

Required:Backend architectureDatabase access patterns
Nice to have:Python (Flask/FastAPI)

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.
Harvey logo

About Harvey

Professional Class AI

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

AILegalLegal AILegal AnalysisLegal Document AnalysisLegal ResearchLegal Techsetter-30
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at Harvey