Harvey is transforming how legal and professional services operate by building a cohesive backend platform that all their services run on. This role aims to design and implement shared frameworks and libraries to abstract common concerns, improve developer experience, and raise the baseline for reliability and performance across all teams, ultimately amplifying the productivity and quality of engineering across the entire company.
Requirements
- 7+ 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
- Experience contributing to or maintaining internal libraries/frameworks is a plus.
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
Other
- This role is based in San Francisco, CA.
- We use an in-person work model (3 days a week) and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work across teams and incorporate feedback.
