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Senior Engineering Manager, Backend Platform

Harvey· Engineering
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Hybrid (New York)$272k - $355kFull-timePosted 5d ago

About the role

Engineering leadership role overseeing the Backend Platform team, defining platform technical vision, and building shared foundations (libraries, frameworks, abstractions) to enable product teams to ship reliably at scale.

Responsibilities

  • Lead and grow the Backend Platform team. Hire, coach, and retain engineers with clear ownership and growth paths.
  • Define the platform’s technical vision and roadmap in partnership with product engineering teams.
  • Build the next generation of Harvey’s backend foundations (shared frameworks for database access, session management, caching, request handling, and streaming).
  • Collaborate with Infrastructure to evolve database usage, replicas, and new storage systems while minimizing burden on product teams.
  • Scale the data layer with a data access layer supporting multiple stores and read replicas; move high-volume data off the primary.
  • Make failure boring by implementing load testing, circuit breakers, timeouts, retries, idempotency, and isolation of noisy neighbors.
  • Shape security and reliability by working with Security/product teams on data handling, workspace isolation, and safeguards against recurring failures.
  • Shape a codebase that humans and AI can build in confidently via modular boundaries, contracts, and automated checks.
  • Turn platform improvements into customer impact by reducing latency, improving observability, and aiding diagnosis of production issues.
  • Stay close to engineering: lead architecture discussions, review critical code, prototype when useful, and collaborate with Infrastructure/Developer Platform/Model Infrastructure/Security and product leaders to drive adoption.

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of software engineering experience and 3+ years of engineering management experience.
  • Deep technical judgment in backend architecture and distributed systems (database access patterns, concurrency, caching, API design, performance).
  • Experience building shared libraries/frameworks/internal platforms adopted by multiple engineering teams.
  • Hands-on design and code review capability; experience guiding migrations in large evolving codebases; Python and Flask/FastAPI experience valued.
  • Track record of hiring, coaching, and developing engineers; culture of ownership and execution.
  • Strong product instincts for developer tools and ensuring engineers’ time is spent effectively.
  • Experience embedding reliability, observability, and security into shared systems with measurable production improvements.
  • Clear communication and cross-team leadership to align technical tradeoffs and drive changes from design to rollout.
  • Experience with AI coding agents and opinions on safe codebases for AI-assisted development.

Skills

Required:Backend architecture and distributed systemsLeadership and people managementDeveloper tools & platform thinking
Nice to have:Python (Flask / FastAPI)

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage
  • 401k with matching up to 4%
  • flexible PTO
  • Equity in the compensation package
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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Harvey is a platform built to meet the standards of the world’s leading professional service firms.

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