Lead Backend Platform & Systems Architecture

Harvey; New York (NY); On-site; USD 272,000 - 355,000; Full time

Job summary

Harvey is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead the Backend Platform team and shape the architecture that powers our AI-enabled legal tech platform. You will own frameworks, libraries, and core abstractions used by product engineers daily, from database access to observability and safe context propagation.

You will hire and mentor engineers, set the technical direction, and collaborate with Security, Infrastructure, and product leadership to ensure reliability and scalable growth.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience.
• 3+ years of engineering management experience.
• Strong backend or platform systems expertise.
• Hands-on experience with Python and frameworks (Flask, FastAPI).
• Proven track record hiring, coaching, and developing engineers.
• Experience embedding reliability, observability, and security into shared systems.
• Hands-on use of AI coding agents and evaluating code safety for teams.
• Clear communication and ability to lead across team boundaries.
• Ability to drive architectural decisions and code reviews at scale.
• Experience guiding migrations across a large evolving codebase.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the Backend Platform team, providing ownership and growth opportunities.
• Define the platform's technical vision and roadmap with product engineering partners.
• Design and evolve shared frameworks for database access, caching, and request handling.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure to evolve databases, replicas, and new storage systems.
• Build a data access layer to move between stores without changing products.
• Improve failure handling with circuits, timeouts, retries, and isolation.
• Work with Security and product teams on safe handling of customer data.
• Create modular, contract-based code with automated checks for safer changes.
• Turn platform enhancements into tangible customer impact on latency and observability.
• Stay close to engineering: review code, prototype, and drive adoption across teams.

Skills

Backend architecture

Distributed systems

Engineering management

Team leadership

Code reviews

Communication

AI coding agents

Developer tools

Security and reliability

Mentoring engineers

Tools

Python

Flask

FastAPI

Job description

Harvey is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead the Backend Platform team and shape the architecture that powers our AI-enabled legal tech platform. You will own frameworks, libraries, and core abstractions used by product engineers daily, from database access to observability and safe context propagation.

You will hire and mentor engineers, set the technical direction, and collaborate with Security, Infrastructure, and product leadership to ensure reliability and scalable growth.