About this role
WHY HARVEY
At Harvey, we’re transforming how legal and professional services operate. By combining frontier agentic AI, an enterprise-grade platform, and deep domain expertise, we’re reshaping how critical knowledge work gets done for decades to come.
This is a rare chance to help build a generational company at a true inflection point. With 2400+ customers in 70+ countries, strong product-market fit, and world-class investor support, we’re scaling fast and defining a new category in real time. The work is ambitious, the bar is high, and the opportunity for growth — personal, professional, and financial — is unmatched.
Our team moves fast, takes ownership, and is deeply committed to the mission — operating with intensity, staying close to our customers, and pushing each other for excellence. We live by three values: Decisiveness, Simplicity, and Job's Not Finished. We act quickly on clear judgment over perfect information, we believe simplicity is what scales, and we're never satisfied with where we are. If you want to do the best work of your career alongside people who share that drive, we'd love to build with you.
At Harvey, the future of professional services is being written today — and we’re just getting started.
ROLE OVERVIEW
As a Staff Database Engineer on the Engineering team at Harvey, you will define how our database infrastructure operates and evolves across our legal AI platform. Harvey runs a global fleet of PostgreSQL databases spanning multiple regions and availability zones. You’ll own the technical strategy for this fleet—setting the standards for migration governance, driving architecture decisions for multi-region scaling, and establishing the operational practices that keep our data layer reliable as we grow.
This is a leadership role with deep hands-on expectations. You’ll partner directly with Principal and Staff Engineers on infrastructure roadmap decisions while also being the person who can diagnose a replication lag spike at 2am. You’ll build the migration review framework, define the tooling strategy, and raise the bar for how the entire engineering organization thinks about database safety and performance.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use an in-person work model and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Migration Governance – Own the migration governance framework end-to-end—design the review workflow, CI gate checks, automated rollback procedures, and fleet-wide deployment sequencing that makes safe migrations the default across the org
- Architecture & Scaling – Drive the technical strategy for Harvey’s global database fleet—multi-region replication design, capacity planning, sharding and partitioning approaches, and fleet-wide observability as we scale into new markets
- Reliability & Performance – Own database reliability and performance at the fleet level—monitoring replication health, optimizing query performance, tuning vacuum and connection manage