Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

About the role

Harvey is generating far more data than we currently know how to use well. Product telemetry, agent execution traces, model usage, customer engagement, financial and operational systems — the volume and the number of teams who need to work with it are both growing faster than any single team can serve by hand. As one of the first hires on our central data platform team, you'll build the systems that let every team at Harvey work with data confidently and independently.

This is a platform charter, not a pipeline queue: you're building the frameworks, tooling, and paved paths that product engineers, data engineers, and analysts all build on, and you're measured by their leverage and general trust in our data systems.

Responsibilities

• Own the data platform's architecture and technical direction — treating data infrastructure as a software product built from reusable frameworks, and making deliberate build-vs-buy tradeoffs as the platform grows
• Build and operate the ingestion layer across streaming, batch, CDC, and third-party connectors, including schema evolution that absorbs upstream change safely rather than silently breaking consumers, so onboarding a new source is a paved path instead of a project
• Land data into Snowflake with the freshness, completeness, and cost characteristics downstream consumers can plan around, and define a clean handoff for Analytics Engineering
• Own the orchestration platform — scheduling, retries, backfills, and dependency management across the full data graph
• Build the transformation and compute frameworks teams can use to process data at scale, and the self-serve tooling that lets product engineers and analysts stand up their own pipelines against primitives you've already made safe
• Design and operate stream processing infrastructure for use cases that can't wait for batch — real-time product features, operational alerting, and near-live reporting
• Build the trust layer: quality and observability (freshness, validation, reconciliation, anomaly detection, alerting routed to the right owner) alongside lineage, cataloging, and discovery, so anyone can find data and know where it came from and what depends on it
• Set the technical bar for data at Harvey through design reviews, standards, documentation, and mentorship as the team grows

Requirements

• 10+ years building and operating production data infrastructure, with ownership of systems other teams depend on
• Deep experience with cloud data warehouses — Snowflake strongly preferred (BigQuery, Databricks, or Redshift experience transfers well) — including performance tuning and cost management
• Hands-on experience building CDC and streaming pipelines with technologies like Kafka, Debezium, Flink, or Spark Streaming
• Strong fluency with workflow orchestration — Temporal, Airflow, Dagster, or similar — operated at scale, not just configured
• Strong programming skills in Python and advanced SQL
• Experience building frameworks or internal tooling that other engineers use, and the product instinct to know when an abstraction is helping versus getting in the way
• Practical experience with data quality, observability, and lineage tooling, and with schema evolution in systems that can't afford downtime
• Working knowledge of data governance in a regulated environment: PII classification, masking, access control, retention, and data residency
• Familiarity with cloud data services (Azure, AWS, GCP), Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi)
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and defining scope where none exists

Qualifications

• Experience with dbt and a close working relationship with analytics engineering teams
• Experience with lakehouse architectures and open table formats (Iceberg, Delta Lake) or query engines like Trino
• Experience operating multi-tenant platforms with strict security, compliance, or data residency requirements
• Exposure to data infrastructure for AI products
• Prior experience as an early or founding data platform hire at a fast-growing company

Skills

• Decisiveness
• Simplicity
• Job's Not Finished

Benefits

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Pay

$231,000 - $340,000 USD Depending on your location

Schedule

Based in San Francisco, CA or New York, NY