Junior Database Engineer Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Job Summary:
Harvey is transforming how legal and professional services operate through innovative AI and a robust platform. The Staff Database Engineer will define and oversee the database infrastructure for their AI platform, ensuring reliability, performance, and governance as the company scales.
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
• Security & Compliance – Partner with Security and Compliance to design and enforce data-layer controls for SOC 2, GDPR, and data residency requirements—access controls, audit logging, encryption standards, and data lifecycle policies
• Strategic Partnership – Represent database engineering in vendor evaluations, build-vs-buy decisions, and technology strategy discussions with engineering leadership
• Team Building – Shape the database engineering function at Harvey—define the operating model, set the hiring bar, mentor engineers on database best practices, and build the culture where teams proactively think about data safety
Qualifications:
Required:
• 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—you’ve set standards across teams, not just operated within one
• Expert-level PostgreSQL knowledge (required)—WAL mechanics, vacuum tuning, logical and physical replication, partitioning strategies, and the ability to debug production issues others can’t. PostgreSQL is our core database and deep fluency is non-negotiable
• 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—you’ve built monitoring strategies using Datadog, pganalyze, or custom instrumentation, and you know which metrics actually predict incidents
• Experience leading database major version upgrades (e.g., PostgreSQL 14 → 16) or sharding initiatives in production with zero downtime
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority—you’ve written RFCs, set standards, and changed how an engineering organization thinks about database operations
• Proficiency with cloud database services at scale (Azure Database for PostgreSQL, GCP Cloud SQL, or AWS RDS/Aurora) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi)
• Clear communication across audiences—you can present a database architecture decision to the VP of Engineering and explain a migration risk to a junior developer with equal clarity
Preferred:
• Strong software engineering skills (Python, Go, or similar)—you build production-grade tooling and automation, not one-off scripts
• Exposure to vector databases, embedding storage, or adjacent systems (Redis, Elasticsearch, Kafka) relevant to AI/ML workloads in regulated industries
• Background building or leading a database engineering function from scratch — defining the team charter, hiring, and operating model
Company:
Harvey provides AI-driven tools to assist legal professionals with research, document review, and contract analysis. Founded in 2022, the company is headquartered in San Francisco, USA, with a team of 501-1000 employees. The company is currently Late Stage.