Staff Software Engineer, Backend Platform

Harvey is transforming how legal and professional services operate by integrating AI and an enterprise-grade platform. As a Backend Platform Engineer, you will design and implement frameworks that enhance developer experience and system reliability, enabling product teams to focus on feature delivery.

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

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
• 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