Senior Backend Platform Leader

Harvey; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 272,000 - 355,000; Full time

Job summary

Harvey is building the Backend Platform team to shape how their backend software is built as AI-enabled workflows expand. You will own frameworks, libraries, and core abstractions used by product engineers, from database access to caching, observability, and safe context propagation.

You’ll hire and develop engineers, set the technical direction, and partner with Infrastructure, Security, and product leaders to deliver reliable, scalable foundations for rapid product delivery across the

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience and 3+ years of engineering management experience.
• Deep technical judgment in backend architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience building shared libraries, frameworks, or internal platforms adopted by multiple engineering teams.
• Hands-on Python with frameworks such as Flask or FastAPI is valuable.
• A track record of hiring, coaching, and developing engineers, setting clear expectations, and creating a culture of ownership and thoughtful execution.
• Strong product instincts for developer tools.
• Experience embedding reliability, observability, and security into shared systems, with measurable improvements in production.
• Clear communication and the ability to lead across team boundaries, align people on technical tradeoffs, and drive changes from design through rollout.
• Serious, hands‑on use of AI coding agents, and opinions on what makes a codebase safe for them to work in.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the Backend Platform team.
• Define the platform’s technical vision and roadmap.
• Build the next generation of Harvey’s backend foundations.
• Help Harvey scale through better architecture.
• Scale the data layer.
• Make failure boring.
• Make security and reliability properties of the platform.
• Shape a codebase that humans and AI can build in confidently.
• Turn platform improvements into customer impact.
• Stay close to the engineering.

Skills

Backend architecture

Distributed systems

Engineering leadership

Hiring and coaching

Python

Code reviews

AI coding agents

Tools

Flask

FastAPI

Job description

Harvey is building the Backend Platform team to shape how their backend software is built as AI-enabled workflows expand. You will own frameworks, libraries, and core abstractions used by product engineers, from database access to caching, observability, and safe context propagation.

You’ll hire and develop engineers, set the technical direction, and partner with Infrastructure, Security, and product leaders to deliver reliable, scalable foundations for rapid product delivery across the