Staff Database Engineer
$191k - $290k • Remote • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 4mo ago
About the job
Harvey is transforming legal and professional services by combining frontier agentic AI with an enterprise-grade platform. We are a fast-scaling company with strong product-market fit, seeking individuals who want to do the best work of their careers alongside driven colleagues. Our values are Decisiveness, Simplicity, and Job's Not Finished, emphasizing quick action, scalable solutions, and continuous improvement.
As a Staff Database Engineer, you will define and evolve our global PostgreSQL database infrastructure. This leadership role involves setting technical strategy for our fleet, establishing standards for migration governance, driving multi-region scaling architecture, and ensuring data layer reliability. You will partner with senior engineers on roadmap decisions while also being hands-on in diagnosing and resolving critical issues.
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end migration governance framework, including review workflows, CI gate checks, automated rollback procedures, and fleet-wide deployment sequencing.
- Drive the technical strategy for the global database fleet, focusing on multi-region replication design, capacity planning, sharding, partitioning, and observability.
- Ensure database reliability and performance at the fleet level through monitoring, query optimization, tuning, and building robust alerting.
- Develop self-service tooling and developer guardrails for migrations, schema changes, health checks, and performance regression detection.
- Lead database incident response, conduct post-incident reviews, and implement systemic improvements through durable processes and tooling.
- Partner with Security and Compliance to design and enforce data-layer controls for SOC 2, GDPR, and data residency requirements.
- Represent database engineering in vendor evaluations, build-vs-buy decisions, and technology strategy discussions.
- Shape the database engineering function by defining the operating model, setting hiring standards, mentoring engineers, and fostering a culture of data safety.
Requirements
- 10+ years of hands-on experience in database administration, DRE, or infrastructure engineering, with PostgreSQL as the primary database.
- Demonstrated staff-level scope, setting standards across teams.
- Expert-level PostgreSQL knowledge, including WAL mechanics, vacuum tuning, replication, partitioning, and production issue debugging.
- Proven track record of building migration governance systems, including frameworks, tooling, and organizational processes.
- Experience architecting database infrastructure for multi-region, high-availability environments, including replication topologies, failover automation, and data consistency trade-offs.
- Deep fluency with database observability, including building monitoring strategies with tools like Datadog or pganalyze.
- Experience leading major version upgrades or sharding initiatives in production with zero downtime.
- Ability to influence technical direction across teams through RFCs, standards setting, and operational process changes.
- Proficiency with cloud database services (Azure PostgreSQL, GCP Cloud SQL, AWS RDS/Aurora) at scale.
- Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or Pulumi.
- Clear communication skills across various audiences.