Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

Description

Why Harvey

At Harvey, we’re transforming how legal and professional services operate. By combining frontier agentic AI, an enterprise-grade platform, and deep domain expertise, we’re reshaping how critical knowledge work gets done for decades to come.

This is a rare chance to help build a generational company at a true inflection point. We have strong product-market fit and world-class investor support. We’re scaling fast and defining a new category in real time. The work is ambitious, the bar is high, and the opportunity for growth — personal, professional, and financial — is unmatched.

Our team moves fast, takes ownership, and is deeply committed to the mission — operating with intensity, staying close to our customers, and pushing each other for excellence. We live by three values: Decisiveness, Simplicity, and Job's Not Finished. We act quickly on clear judgment over perfect information, we believe simplicity is what scales, and we're never satisfied with where we are. If you want to do the best work of your career alongside people who share that drive, we'd love to build with you.

At Harvey, the future of professional services is being written today — and we’re just getting started.

Role Overview

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.

The near-term foundation is ingestion and the warehouse — reliable streaming and batch paths into Snowflake, CDC off production systems, orchestration, and schema evolution that absorbs upstream change instead of breaking under it, and factors in the hard data sensitivity requirements our domain requires.

From there the charter expands to the rest of what a modern data platform owes its users: transformation and compute frameworks, self-serve tooling so teams can stand up their own pipelines against well-tested primitives, real-time and stream processing for products and internal systems that can't wait for a nightly batch, and the quality, lineage, and governance layers that make the whole thing trustworthy. Handling PII correctly and honoring multi-region data residency aren't nice to have features here — they're constraints the platform has to satisfy by construction, for customers who are among the most security-conscious institutions in the world.

You'll sit between Analytics, Data Engineering, product teams, and Infrastructure. Today this work is distributed and improvised. You'll make it a system, set the technical direction, and help build the team around you.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA or New York, NY

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
• Build the patterns and tooling for PII and sensitive data — classification, masking, retention, access control — and for multi-region residency requirements
• Set the technical bar for data at Harvey through design reviews, standards, documentation, and mentorship as the team grows
• What You Have
• 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
• Experience with managed ingestion tooling (Fivetran, Airbyte, or similar) and clear judgment about when to buy the connector and when to build it
• 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

Requirements

• 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
• Compensation
• $231,000 - $340,000 USD
• Depending on your location, an Applicant Privacy Notice may apply to you. You can find all of our Applicant Privacy Notices here .
• #LI-AN2
• 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.
• We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made by emailing accommodations@harvey.ai