Software Engineer, Database Infra

Role Overview

As a Staff Database Engineer on the Engineering team at Harvey, you will define how our database infrastructure operates and evolves across our legal AI platform. Harvey runs a global fleet of PostgreSQL databases spanning multiple regions and availability zones. You’ll own the technical strategy for this fleet—setting the standards for migration governance, driving architecture decisions for multi-region scaling, and establishing the operational practices that keep our data layer reliable as we grow.

This is a leadership role with deep hands-on expectations. You’ll partner directly with Principal and Staff Engineers on infrastructure roadmap decisions while also being the person who can diagnose a replication lag spike at 2am. You’ll build the migration review framework, define the tooling strategy, and raise the bar for how the entire engineering organization thinks about database safety and performance.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use an in-person work model and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

What You'll Do

• Migration Governance – Own the migration governance framework end-to-end—design the review workflow, CI gate checks, automated rollback procedures, and fleet-wide deployment sequencing that makes safe migrations the default across the org
• Architecture & Scaling – Drive the technical strategy for Harvey’s global database fleet—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 the alerting that gives us confidence across all production environments
• Platform & Tooling – Build self-service tooling and developer guardrails—migration dry-runs, schema diff previews, automated health checks, 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—triage production issues, run post-incident reviews, and turn 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—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—define the operating model, set the hiring bar, mentor engineers on database best practices, and build the culture where teams proactively think about data safety

What You Have

• 10+ years of hands-on experience in database administration, database reliability engineering, or infrastructure engineering with PostgreSQL as your primary database, with demonstrated staff-level scope—you’ve set standards across teams, not just operated within one
• Expert-level PostgreSQL knowledge (required)—WAL mechanics, vacuum tuning, logical and physical replication, partitioning strategies, and the ability to debug production issues others can’t. PostgreSQL is our core database and deep fluency is non-negotiable
• Track record of building migration governance systems—not just reviewing migrations, but designing the frameworks, tooling, and organizational processes that make safe migrations the default
• Experience architecting database infrastructure for multi-region, high-availability environments—replication topologies, failover automation, and data consistency trade-offs at fleet scale
• Deep fluency with database observability—you’ve built monitoring strategies using Datadog, pganalyze, or custom instrumentation, and you know which metrics actually predict incidents
• Experience leading database major version upgrades (e.g., PostgreSQL 14 → 16) or sharding initiatives in production with zero downtime
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority—you’ve written RFCs, set standards, and changed 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)
• Clear communication across audiences—you can present a database architecture decision to the VP of Engineering and explain a migration risk to a junior developer with equal clarity

Bonus

• Strong software engineering skills (Python, Go, or similar)—you build production-grade tooling and automation, not one-off scripts
• Exposure to vector databases, embedding storage, or adjacent systems (Redis, Elasticsearch, Kafka) relevant to AI/ML workloads in regulated industries
• Background building or leading a database engineering function from scratch — defining the team charter, hiring, and operating model

Compensation