Staff Software Engineer, Backend Platform

Harvey • San Francisco, CA

3d • $231,000 - $325,000

About The Position

As a Backend Platform Engineer at Harvey, you will help build and operate the shared backend platform used by the company’s services. You will design and implement frameworks and libraries that address common engineering needs, improve developer experience, and raise reliability and performance across teams. The platform’s purpose is to help product teams ship reliable, observable, and performant experiences quickly and safely by centralizing common capabilities and avoiding duplicated work.

This is a high-impact role focused on foundational systems and cross-cutting technical challenges. You will develop platform abstractions and patterns, improve scalability and monitoring, and collaborate with model infrastructure, developer experience, infrastructure, and product engineering teams. You will also gather feedback, promote best practices, and provide strong defaults and clear documentation so teams can build and deploy services with confidence.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of software engineering experience after a bachelor’s or master’s degree, including experience building scalable backend systems or internal developer platforms.
• Proficiency in Python or similar languages and deep knowledge of backend fundamentals, including APIs, data stores, concurrency, and distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with web frameworks and service architectures, such as Flask or FastAPI, bounded-context services, or microservices, and an understanding of clean, versioned API design.
• Familiarity with caching, messaging, and database technologies such as Redis, Kafka, SQL/NoSQL databases, and vector databases, and how to use them for performance and reliability.
• A track record of writing high-quality, well-tested code and using unit and integration testing, static typing, and CI to catch issues early and ensure reliability.
• Strong problem-solving skills and interest in improving developer experience by creating tools or frameworks that make engineers more productive.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, including the ability to work across teams and incorporate feedback.

Nice To Haves

• Experience contributing to or maintaining internal libraries or frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain internal backend frameworks and libraries for common capabilities such as API routing, service lifecycle management, caching and messaging primitives, and error handling.
• Create and improve APIs, service templates, and versioned interfaces that establish consistent patterns for new services and features.
• Introduce and promote backend architecture patterns such as asynchronous I/O with asyncio and streaming data processing to improve performance and scalability.
• Design Harvey-specific abstractions and domain-specific frameworks for cross-cutting concerns, including authorization and streaming, as well as data governance and event processing.
• Build tracing, metrics, and automated tests into the platform to improve reliability and observability.
• Collaborate with the Model Infrastructure team on GenAI-native application needs, including high-throughput model inference, streaming and long-running API interactions, and abstractions for retrieval, context handling, and prompt lifecycle.
• Work with Developer Experience and Infrastructure teams to integrate platform components with deployment and monitoring systems.
• Gather feedback from product engineering teams, promote best practices, and provide strong defaults and clear documentation that help teams move quickly and confidently.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed