Why Harvey

At Harvey were transforming how legal and professional services operate not incrementally but end-to-end. By combining frontier agentic AI an enterprise-grade platform and deep domain expertise were 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. With 1000 customers in 60 countries strong product-market fit and world-class investor support were 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 is sharp motivated and deeply committed to the mission. We move fast operate with intensity and take real ownership of the problems we tackle from early thinking to long-term outcomes. We stay close to our customers from leadership to engineers and work together to solve real problems with urgency and care. If you thrive in ambiguity push for excellence and want to help shape the future of work alongside others who raise the bar we invite you to build with us.

At Harvey the future of professional services is being written today and were just getting started.

Role Overview

As a Staff Database Administrator 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. Youll own the technical strategy for this fleetsetting 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. Youll 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. Youll 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 Youll Do

• Migration Governance Own the migration governance framework end-to-enddesign 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 Harveys global database fleetmulti-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 levelmonitoring 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 guardrailsmigration dry-runs schema diff previews automated health checks performance regression detectionso engineering teams can move fast without bottlenecking on a single DBA

• Incident Leadership Lead database incident response and drive systemic improvementstriage 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 requirementsaccess 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 Harveydefine 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 scopeyouve 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 cant. PostgreSQL is our core database and deep fluency is non-negotiable

• Track record of building migration governance systemsnot 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 environmentsreplication topologies failover automation and data consistency trade-offs at fleet scale

• Deep fluency with database observabilityyouve 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 authorityyouve 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 audiencesyou 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

$190720 - $286080

Depending on your location an Applicant Privacy Notice may apply to you. You can find all of our Applicant Privacy Notices here.

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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

Required Experience:

Staff IC