Senior Engineering Manager
About The Position
Harvey is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead its Backend Platform team, which builds the shared foundations used by product engineers across the company. The role owns frameworks, libraries, and core abstractions spanning database access, caching, request handling, observability, and safe context propagation. The manager will help establish architectural boundaries, reusable building blocks, and automated safeguards that make effective engineering patterns easier to adopt and production failures less likely. This is a technical leadership role combining team development with hands-on architectural guidance. The manager will hire and develop engineers, set technical direction, partner with product and infrastructure teams, and remain engaged in design discussions, critical code reviews, and difficult systems problems. The work includes evolving backend and data-layer architecture, improving scalability, reliability, security, observability, and performance, and making the codebase easier for both engineers and AI coding agents to work in confidently.
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience and 3+ years of engineering management experience.
- A 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, with the ability to balance useful abstractions and user flexibility.
- Technical depth to participate directly in design and code reviews, investigate difficult systems problems, and guide migrations across a large, evolving codebase.
- 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, including listening to engineers’ feedback and turning it into simpler, more effective ways to build.
- Experience embedding reliability, observability, and security into shared systems, with measurable production improvements.
- Clear communication 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 opinions on what makes a codebase safe for them to work in.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with Python and frameworks such as Flask or FastAPI.
Responsibilities
- Lead and grow the Backend Platform team by hiring, coaching, and retaining engineers, setting clear ownership, and supporting their development.
- Define the platform’s technical vision and roadmap in partnership with product engineering teams, prioritizing investments with broad organizational impact.
- Guide the design of 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, making those capabilities accessible to product teams.
- Build a data access layer that supports moving entities to new stores, such as KV or NoSQL, without requiring product changes; improve use of read replicas and move high-volume data off the primary database.
- Improve resilience through load testing, circuit breakers, standardized 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 failure patterns.
- Establish modular code boundaries, enforceable contracts, and automated checks that make code changes easier to reason about, review, and ship.
- Improve latency, observability, and production issue diagnosis; measure outcomes through adoption, developer productivity, and product performance and reliability.
- Lead architecture discussions, review critical code, prototype where useful, and help engineers navigate technical tradeoffs.
- Partner with Infrastructure, Developer Platform, Model Infrastructure, Security, and product engineering leaders to drive changes through adoption.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
