Staff Database Engineer

Job Description

Company: Harvey
Location: San Francisco, CA
Workplace Type: On-site
Employment Type: Full-time
Pay / Compensation: $190,720 – $325,000

About the Role

Harvey is transforming how legal and professional services operate by combining frontier agentic AI, an enterprise-grade platform, and deep domain expertise. As a Staff Database Engineer on the Engineering team, you will define how database infrastructure operates and evolves across Harvey’s legal AI platform. Harvey runs a global fleet of PostgreSQL databases spanning multiple regions and availability zones. You will own the technical strategy for this fleet, setting standards for migration governance, multi-region scaling, and operational reliability.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

• Own the migration governance framework end-to-end, including review workflows, CI gate checks, and automated rollback procedures.
• Drive technical strategy for Harvey’s global PostgreSQL database fleet, including multi-region replication design, capacity planning, and partitioning.
• Ensure database reliability and performance at fleet scale by monitoring replication health, tuning autovacuum, optimizing queries, and managing connection pooling.
• Build self-service developer tooling and guardrails including migration dry-runs, schema diff previews, and performance regression detection.
• Lead database incident response, triage production emergencies, and conduct post-incident reviews to implement durable fixes.
• Partner with Security and Compliance to enforce data-layer controls for SOC 2, GDPR, audit logging, and encryption.
• Mentor engineers across the organization on database safety and best practices.

Requirements & Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on experience in database administration, database reliability engineering, or infrastructure engineering with PostgreSQL as the primary database.
• Expert-level PostgreSQL knowledge including WAL mechanics, autovacuum tuning, logical and physical replication, and partitioning.
• Demonstrated experience architecting database infrastructure for multi-region, high-availability deployments.
• Proven track record designing and implementing database migration governance frameworks and tooling.
• Deep fluency with database observability and metrics using tools such as Datadog or pganalyze.
• Experience leading zero-downtime database major version upgrades in production environments.
• Experience with cloud database services (Azure Database for PostgreSQL, GCP Cloud SQL, or AWS RDS/Aurora) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi).

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications

• Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, or similar languages for building production-grade automation tooling.
• Experience with vector databases, embedding storage, or streaming systems (Redis, Elasticsearch, Kafka).
• Experience establishing or leading a database engineering function from the ground up.

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive salary range of $190,720 to $325,000 with equity opportunities.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
• In-person collaborative culture in San Francisco with relocation assistance available.

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, or any other basis protected by law. Reasonable accommodations are provided for applicants with disabilities.