Staff Database Engineer

Harvey
San Francisco
Workplace: HybridFull timeUSD 190,720 - 286,080 annuallyFunction: Administration & Executive AssistanceExperience: 10+ yearsSkills: ["Leadership","Communication","Problem-solving","Influencing"]

Lead and own Harvey's global PostgreSQL fleet, defining migration governance, multi-region architecture, and fleet-wide reliability. Collaborate with Principal/Staff Engineers on infrastructure roadmaps, diagnose complex issues, and build tooling to empower engineering teams. This senior role is based in San Francisco with relocation support, blending hands-on work with strategic governance.

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Harvey
Harvey
4 months ago

Staff Database Engineer

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Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 17 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Lead and own Harvey's global PostgreSQL fleet, defining migration governance, multi-region architecture, and fleet-wide reliability. Collaborate with Principal/Staff Engineers on infrastructure roadmaps, diagnose complex issues, and build tooling to empower engineering teams. This senior role is based in San Francisco with relocation support, blending hands-on work with strategic governance.
Location: San Francisco
Workplace: Hybrid
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Administration & Executive Assistance

Key Responsibilities

  • •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

Pay and Benefits

Salary: USD 190,720 - 286,080 annually
Equity and Bonus:Equity

Key Requirements

  • •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.
  • •Expert-level PostgreSQL knowledge (required)—WAL mechanics, vacuum tuning, logical and physical replication, partitioning strategies, and debugging production issues.
  • •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—monitoring strategies using Datadog, pganalyze, or custom instrumentation and metrics that predict incidents.
Experience:10+ yearsLegal techEnterprise software
Skills:LeadershipCommunicationProblem-solvingInfluencing
Languages:English
Tech Stack:PostgreSQLWALVacuum tuningLogical replicationPhysical replicationPartitioningDatadogPganalyzeTerraformPulumiAzure Database for PostgreSQLGCP Cloud SQLAWS RDSAurora

Company Brief

Harvey
Harvey builds domain-specific generative AI for legal and professional services, automating contract analysis, due diligence, compliance, and litigation workflows for law firms and corporate legal teams.
Industry: LegalTech
Company Size: Large (251 to 1,000 employees)
Revenue: USD 100M to 250M
Growth: Scaleup
Valuation: Unicorn (USD 1B+)
Funding: Series E+
Headquarters: San Francisco, United States
Founded: 2022
Glassdoor
Glassdoor: 4.1
WebsiteLinkedInGlassdoor