Why Harvey

At Harvey, we’re transforming how legal and professional services operate — not incrementally, but end-to-end. By combining frontier agentic AI, an enterprise-grade platform, and deep domain expertise, we’re reshaping how critical knowledge work gets done for decades to come.

This is a rare chance to help build a generational company at a true inflection point. With 700+ customers in 58+ countries, strong product-market fit, and world-class investor support, we’re scaling fast and defining a new category in real time. The work is ambitious, the bar is high, and the opportunity for growth — personal, professional, and financial — is unmatched.

Our team is sharp, motivated, and deeply committed to the mission. We move fast, operate with intensity, and take real ownership of the problems we tackle — from early thinking to long-term outcomes. We stay close to our customers — from leadership to engineers — and work together to solve real problems with urgency and care. If you thrive in ambiguity, push for excellence, and want to help shape the future of work alongside others who raise the bar, we invite you to build with us.

At Harvey, the future of professional services is being written today — and we’re just getting started.

Role Overview

As the Head of Backend Platform at Harvey, you will lead and shape the development of the shared backend frameworks and services that our product teams rely on every day. In this hands-on technical leadership role, you’ll build and lead a high-caliber team of engineers, working alongside them to design and implement critical platform components that form the scalable foundation for all of Harvey’s products. You will define the vision and roadmap for our backend platform — emphasizing solving common problems once and well, creating strong defaults, and enabling product teams to build on a reliable, standardized base. If you’re excited about maximizing engineering leverage, driving technical strategy, and still love to roll up your sleeves to code, we’d love to hear from you.

This is a role based in San Francisco, CA. We use an in-person work model (3 days a week) and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

What You’ll Do

• Define and drive the technical roadmap for Harvey’s backend platform, identifying opportunities to create new frameworks or improve existing ones to support our rapid product growth

• Lead the design and development of core platform components and primitives (API routing layers, service lifecycle management, caching and messaging libraries, error handling frameworks, etc.), ensuring they are scalable, secure, and easy for product teams to use

• Remain hands-on with development: architect and review critical code, build prototypes for new platform capabilities, and set high engineering standards through code reviews and mentorship

• Champion modern backend practices like asynchronous programming (asyncio), robust error handling, and built-in observability, and drive their adoption across all platform services and tools

• Collaborate with Infrastructure, Developer Experience, and Security teams to ensure our platform integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, and compliance requirements

• 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

• Partner closely with product engineering leads to anticipate their needs, gather feedback on platform tools, and evangelize platform solutions — ensuring we build the right abstractions that truly accelerate product development

• Mentor and manage a small team of backend platform engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, reliability-first thinking, and continuous improvement. You will help grow the team’s capabilities and keep projects on track to high-quality outcomes

What You Have

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading high-performance teams and owning the design and implementation of large-scale backend systems or internal platforms

• Proven ability to lead technical projects or teams — you have been a senior engineer or tech lead (or manager) responsible for critical backend systems and have guided other engineers

• Deep expertise in backend architecture and technologies: you are well-versed in building distributed systems, microservices, and high-performance applications (experience with Python and frameworks like Flask/FastAPI, or similar tech, is highly valued)

• Strong understanding of reliability, scalability, and security best practices, and experience embedding these into frameworks and tools used by other engineers

• Hands-on experience creating or maintaining shared libraries, APIs, or developer tools that were adopted by multiple teams — you think in terms of reusable solutions and clear interfaces

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills. You can work effectively across teams and explain complex technical concepts to stakeholders at various levels

• Passion for developer experience and productivity — you care about making engineering easier for others and have a keen eye for identifying sources of complexity or friction

• Experience in a fast-paced startup environment or building platform infrastructure in a growing company is a plus

Compensation Range

$260,000 - 350,000 USD

Please find our CA applicant privacy notice here.

Harvey is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made by emailing [email protected]