Staff Database Engineer

Mission

At Harvey, we’re transforming how legal and professional services operate by combining frontier agentic AI, an enterprise-grade platform, and deep domain expertise. This is a rare chance to help build a generational company at a true inflection point.

Role Overview

The Staff Database Engineer on the Engineering team at Harvey will define how our database infrastructure operates and evolves across our legal AI platform. This is a leadership role with deep hands-on expectations.

What You'll Do

• Migration Governance – Own the migration governance framework end-to-end, including design of the review workflow, CI gate checks, automated rollback procedures, and fleet-wide deployment sequencing.
• Architecture & Scaling – Drive the technical strategy for Harvey’s global database fleet, including 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 management, and building alerting that gives us confidence across all production environments.
• Platform & Tooling – Build self-service tooling and developer guardrails, such as migration dry-runs, schema diff previews, automated health checks, and performance regression detection, so engineering teams can move fast without bottlenecking on a single DBA.
• Incident Leadership – Lead database incident response and drive systemic improvements, triaging production issues, running post-incident reviews, and turning lessons learned into durable process and tooling fixes.

Even Better If You Can

• Security & Compliance – Partner with Security and Compliance to design and enforce data-layer controls for SOC 2, GDPR, and data residency requirements, including access controls, audit logging, encryption standards, and data lifecycle policies.
• Strategic Partnership – Represent database engineering in vendor evaluations, build-vs-buy decisions, and technology strategy discussions with engineering leadership.
• Team Building – Shape the database engineering function at Harvey, including defining the operating model, setting the hiring bar, mentoring engineers on database best practices, and building the culture where teams proactively think about data safety.

Requirements

• 10+ years of hands-on experience in database administration, database reliability engineering, or infrastructure engineering with PostgreSQL as your primary database.
• Expert-level PostgreSQL knowledge, including WAL mechanics, vacuum tuning, logical and physical replication, partitioning strategies, and the ability to debug production issues.
• Experience architecting database infrastructure for multi-region, high-availability environments, including replication topologies, failover automation, and data consistency trade-offs at fleet scale.
• Deep fluency with database observability, including monitoring strategies using Datadog, pganalyze, or custom instrumentation, and understanding which metrics predict incidents.
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority, including writing RFCs, setting standards, and changing how an engineering organization thinks about database operations.
• Proficiency with cloud database services at scale (Azure Database for PostgreSQL, GCP Cloud SQL, or AWS RDS/Aurora) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi).

Compensation

$190,720 - $290,000 Depending on your location, an Applicant Privacy Notice may apply to you. Harvey is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.