Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience (devex)

Harvey Harvey · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · Engineering

Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience (DevEx) at Harvey, an AI-native company transforming legal and professional services. This role focuses on building and scaling the developer platform, CI/CD systems, internal frameworks, and guardrails to enable rapid and safe AI feature shipping. Key responsibilities include developing load testing and benchmarking infrastructure for AI-native applications, pioneering AI agent integration into the software development lifecycle, and collaborating with teams to embed reliability and observability. The role requires strong technical leadership and experience in backend systems or internal developer platforms, with a strong plus for experience integrating AI agents into a developer ecosystem.

What you'd actually do

  1. Develop and scale a world-class developer platform to accelerate Harvey's hyper growth. Boost velocity and stability through robust CI/CD systems, effective test frameworks, and reliable development environments.
  2. Build load testing and benchmarking infrastructure essential for evaluating and optimizing the performance of AI-native applications.
  3. Pioneer the future of software development and site reliability engineering by integrating AI agents across the software development, deployment and maintenance lifecycle.
  4. Collaborate with Backend Platform teams to embed testability, reliability and observability into the platform, ensuring services built on our foundation are robust, easy to test and maintain.
  5. Work closely with engineering teams to gather feedback, evangelize best practices, and make the “paved road” a reality — empowering every Harvey engineer to move fast with confidence.

Skills

Required

  • 7+ years of software engineering experience, including building scalable backend systems or internal developer platforms
  • Proficiency in Python (or similar languages) and deep knowledge of backend development fundamentals and distributed systems
  • Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems (Builtekite, Github Actions), test frameworks, or load and performance testing
  • Hands-on experience with container technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) and infrastructure as code (Pulumi, Terraform)
  • A track record of producing high-quality, well-tested code, consistently following software development best practices to ensure quality and reliability
  • Proven technical leadership throughout the entire project lifecycle, including ideation, design, implementation, and productionization
  • Experience mentoring engineers, guiding architectural decisions, and shaping culture to foster engineering excellence
  • Strong problem-solving skills and a passion for improving developer experience — you enjoy creating tools or frameworks that make other engineers more productive
  • Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work across teams and incorporate feedback

Nice to have

  • Experience integrating AI agents into a developer ecosystem

What the JD emphasized

  • integrating AI agents across the software development, deployment and maintenance lifecycle
  • integrating AI agents into a developer ecosystem is a strong plus

Other signals

  • AI agents across the software development, deployment and maintenance lifecycle
  • integrating AI agents into a developer ecosystem
  • AI-native company
  • AI-native applications