Senior Software Engineer, Backend Platform
$238k - $290k • Remote • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 7mo ago
About the job
Harvey is transforming legal and professional services by combining AI, an enterprise platform, and domain expertise. This is a chance to help build a generational company at an inflection point, with strong product-market fit and investor support, as we scale rapidly and define a new category. The team moves fast, takes ownership, and is committed to the mission, valuing decisiveness, simplicity, and continuous improvement. As a Backend Platform Engineer, you will build and operate the cohesive backend platform supporting all Harvey services. This role focuses on designing and implementing shared frameworks and libraries to abstract common concerns, enhance developer experience, and improve reliability and performance across teams, enabling product engineers to focus on shipping features.
Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain internal backend frameworks and libraries for common capabilities like API routing, service lifecycle management, caching, messaging, and error handling.
- Create and improve APIs, service templates, and versioned interfaces to establish consistent patterns for building new services and features.
- Introduce and champion modern backend architecture patterns such as asynchronous I/O and streaming data processing to enhance platform performance and scalability.
- Design Harvey-specific abstractions and domain-specific frameworks for cross-cutting concerns like authorization, streaming, data governance, and event processing.
- Embed reliability and observability into the platform by building in tracing, metrics, and automated tests to ensure services are robust and easy to monitor.
- Collaborate with the Model Infrastructure team to address challenges unique to GenAI-native applications, including high-throughput model inference, streaming interactions, and retrieval/context handling.
- Collaborate with Developer Experience and Infrastructure teams to integrate platform components into the deployment and monitoring ecosystem.
- Work closely with product engineering teams to gather feedback, evangelize best practices, and implement a "paved road" approach with strong defaults and clear documentation.
Requirements
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, 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 designing clean, versioned APIs.
- Familiarity with caching, messaging, and database technologies (Redis, Kafka, SQL/NoSQL databases, Vector databases) and their effective use for performance and reliability.
- A track record of writing high-quality, well-tested code and using tools like unit/integration testing, static typing, and CI to ensure reliability.
- Strong problem-solving skills and a passion for improving developer experience by creating tools or frameworks.
- 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.