Staff Software Engineer | Developer Experience

Harvey builds AI for legal work, and this staff role is on developer experience, meaning the internal platform and tooling that decides how fast every other engineer can ship. Scope as published covers scalable backend systems and internal developer platforms, CI/CD systems, test frameworks and load and performance testing, container technology and infrastructure as code. The stack is named concretely: Python, Buildkite and GitHub Actions, Docker and Kubernetes, Pulumi and Terraform. Developer experience roles are a good signal about an engineering organisation, since a company only staffs one at this level when it has enough engineers for the leverage to be real. Stated bar is ten or more years including technical leadership across the full project lifecycle. Good fit if you like building for engineers.

Published requirements: 10+ years of software engineering experience including building scalable backend systems or internal developer platforms; proficiency in Python or a similar language with deep knowledge of backend fundamentals and distributed systems; hands on experience with CI/CD systems, with Buildkite and GitHub Actions named, plus test frameworks and load and performance testing; hands on experience with container technologies including Docker and Kubernetes and infrastructure as code with Pulumi or Terraform; a track record of producing high quality, well tested code and following software development best practice consistently; proven technical leadership across the entire project lifecycle from ideation through design and implementation to productionisation; and experience mentoring other engineers. Location is Bengaluru. What developer experience work involves in practice: build and test performance, so how long an engineer waits between writing code and knowing whether it works; local development environment reliability; CI pipeline design and flakiness reduction; release and deployment tooling; and the internal platform abstractions that let product teams ship without needing to understand the whole infrastructure. Success is measured indirectly, through the productivity of other teams, which is both the appeal and the difficulty of the role. Employer context: Harvey builds AI tools for legal and professional services work, and publishes three stated values, decisiveness, simplicity and Job's Not Finished, along with candid language about moving fast, operating with intensity and staying close to customers. Its other two engineering roles today both ask for 12+ years, so the bar across this team is consistently senior. Good fit for a platform engineer with ten or more years who would rather multiply other engineers' output than own a product surface. Ask about on call, since the posting does not state the model.