Staff Database Administrator

Why Harvey

At Harvey, we’re 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, we’re 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 58+ countries, strong product-market fit, and world-class investor support, we’re 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 we’re just getting started.

Role Overview

As a Staff Database Administrator at Harvey, you will own how our database infrastructure operates and evolves. Harvey runs a global fleet of PostgreSQL databases spanning multiple regions and availability zones. As a Staff DBA, you will own the operational health, reliability, and scaling strategy for this fleet. You will set the standards for how we ship migrations safely, keep systems healthy during rapid growth, and give engineering teams the tooling and guardrails to move fast without risk to production.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will partner with Principal and Staff Engineers on database infrastructure roadmap while also being the person who diagnoses production issues firsthand.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use an in-person work model and offer relocation assistance.

What You'll Do

• Own migration governance end-to-end, including review workflows, CI gate checks, rollback procedures, and fleet-wide deployment sequencing

• Build self-service tooling and developer guardrails so engineering teams can move fast without bottlenecking on a single DBA

• Lead incident response for database issues, run post-incident reviews, and convert findings into durable operational improvements

• Own fleet-level reliability, including replication health monitoring, query performance tuning, vacuum management, connection pooling, and production alerting

• Operate and scale our multi-region database fleet, including replication topology, capacity planning, and sharding strategy as we grow into new markets

• Drive technical strategy for our global database fleet, covering multi-region replication, capacity planning, sharding, and fleet-wide observability

Even Better If You Can

• Partner with Security and Compliance to design and enforce data-layer controls for SOC 2, GDPR, and data residency requirements

• Represent database engineering in vendor evaluations, build-vs-buy decisions, and technology strategy discussions

• Shape the database engineering function, including the operating model, hiring bar, and mentoring culture

What You Have

• 10+ years in database administration, database engineering, or reliability engineering with PostgreSQL as your primary database, with staff-level scope setting standards across teams

• Expert-level PostgreSQL knowledge, including internals, replication, partitioning, and the ability to debug production issues others cannot

• Track record building migration governance systems, not just reviewing migrations but designing the frameworks and processes that make safe migrations the default

• Experience operating database infrastructure for multi-region, high-availability environments at fleet scale

• Strong operational instincts around observability, knowing which metrics predict incidents and how to instrument for them

• Experience leading major version upgrades or sharding initiatives in production with zero downtime

• Proven ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority

• Proficiency with cloud database services at scale and infrastructure-as-code

• Clear communication across audiences, from engineering leadership to junior developers

Bonus

• Strong software engineering skills and ability to build production-grade tooling and automation

• Exposure to vector databases, embedding storage, or adjacent data systems relevant to AI/ML workloads

• Background building or leading a database engineering function from scratch

Compensation

$190,720 - $286,080

Please find our CA applicant privacy notice 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 [email protected]