Senior Engineering Manager

Harvey•New York, NY

3d•$272,000 - $355,000

About The Position

Harvey is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead its Backend Platform team, which builds shared foundations used by product engineers across the company. The team owns frameworks, libraries, and core abstractions for areas such as database access, caching, request handling, observability, and safe context propagation. The role combines technical leadership and people management, with responsibility for the team’s growth, technical direction, and architectural work. The manager will help shape a platform that supports software built by engineers and AI coding agents. This includes establishing clear architectural boundaries, reusable building blocks, strong defaults, and automated safeguards. The role partners with Infrastructure, Developer Platform, Model Infrastructure, Security, and product engineering teams to improve scalability, reliability, security, performance, and the developer experience. The position offers compensation of $272,000–$355,000 USD. Depending on location, an Applicant Privacy Notice may apply. Harvey is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience and 3+ years of engineering management experience.
Track record of building strong teams and delivering complex backend or platform systems.
Deep technical judgment in backend architecture and distributed systems, including database access patterns, concurrency, caching, API design, and performance.
Experience building shared libraries, frameworks, or internal platforms adopted by multiple engineering teams, while balancing abstraction with user flexibility.
Technical depth to participate in design and code reviews, investigate difficult systems problems, and guide migrations across a large, evolving codebase.
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, including the ability to understand engineers’ pain points and turn feedback into simpler, more effective ways to build.
Experience embedding reliability, observability, and security into shared systems, with measurable production improvements.
Clear communication skills and 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 informed opinions on making a codebase safe for them to use.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Python and frameworks such as Flask or FastAPI.

Responsibilities

Lead, hire, coach, and retain the Backend Platform team, giving engineers clear ownership and opportunities to grow.
Define the platform’s technical vision and roadmap in partnership with product engineering teams.
Build shared backend frameworks for database access, session management, caching, request handling, and streaming.
Work with Infrastructure to evolve application use of databases, replicas, and new storage systems.
Build a data access layer that allows entities to move to new storage systems, such as KV or NoSQL, without product changes; improve use of read replicas and move high-volume data off the primary database.
Improve resilience through load testing, circuit breakers, standard outbound clients with timeouts, retries and idempotency, and noisy-neighbor isolation.
Partner with Security and product teams to improve customer-data handling, workspace isolation, and safeguards against recurring production failures.
Establish modular codebase boundaries, enforceable contracts, and automated checks to support safe and confident engineering by people and AI coding agents.
Improve latency, observability, and production issue diagnosis; measure results through adoption, developer productivity, and product performance and reliability.
Lead architecture discussions, review critical code, prototype when useful, and guide engineers through difficult technical tradeoffs.
Collaborate with Infrastructure, Developer Platform, Model Infrastructure, Security, and product engineering leaders to deliver and drive adoption of platform changes.