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Location
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New York
Employment Type
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Full time
Location Type
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Hybrid
Department
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Engineering
Compensation
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- $193\.4K – $290K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus
*Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in our equity plan and benefits program. Benefits include, but not limited to: Comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits (401k match up to 4%), and flexible PTO.*
Why Harvey
==============
At Harvey, we’re transforming how legal and professional services operate. 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 1500\+ customers in 60\+ 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 moves fast, takes ownership, and is deeply committed to the mission — operating with intensity, staying close to our customers, and pushing each other for excellence. We live by three values: Decisiveness, Simplicity, and Job's Not Finished. We act quickly on clear judgment over perfect information, we believe simplicity is what scales, and we're never satisfied with where we are. If you want to do the best work of your career alongside people who share that drive, we'd love to build with you.
At Harvey, the future of professional services is being written today — and we’re just getting started.
Role Overview
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Harvey’s products all depend on a shared AI foundation: the model layer and agent infrastructure that determine the quality of work our agents deliver. Legal is one of the hardest domains for AI: documents run to hundreds of pages, matters can span millions of files, and there is zero margin for error on accuracy.
The AI Platform team builds the foundation that every product and agent team at Harvey builds upon. This team is early and there’s a lot to build: model routing, agent architecture, context management, evals. Your work here sets the ceiling for what Harvey’s AI can do.
Representative Projects
===========================
- Context Engineering \& Agent Infrastructure. Build the platform\-level systems for context management, session state, and memory that all of Harvey’s agents and products rely on.
- Model Integration \& Routing. Own the infrastructure that lets Harvey onboard new foundation models fast and route to the right one for every task \- a capability every product team depends on.
- Evaluation Infrastructure. Build the shared eval tooling and frameworks that let every team across Harvey measure and improve AI quality systematically.
- Shared Abstractions. Create the SDKs, platform primitives, and developer tooling that make it dramatically easier for product teams to ship AI\-powered features.
What You'll Do
==================
- Design and build abstractions and platform\-level systems that improve all of Harvey’s agentic products.
- Own infrastructure for model integration, routing, and evaluation that helps Harvey choose and deploy the right foundation model for any given context.
- Build evaluation frameworks and tooling that let every team across Harvey iterate on AI quality effectively.
- Partner closely with product engineering teams, PMs, and design to launch cutting\-edge AI products.
- Evaluate, prototype, and integrate the latest advancements in AI and agentic systems as they emerge.
What You Have
=================
- 5\+ years of experience building backend systems, with at least 1\+ year focused on AI/ML engineering. Staff candidates will typically have 8\+ years and a track record of technical leadership across teams.
- Experience building and shipping multi\-model or multi\-provider AI systems in production.
- Familiarity with context management, session state, or memory systems in AI or distributed systems. You’ve thought about what the model sees and why it matters.
- A track record of building internal platforms, SDKs, or shared infrastructure that other engineering teams actually adopted \- and an understanding of why developer experience matters as much as raw capability.
- Strong judgment about abstractions. Opinionated about good design but pragmatic about shipping incrementally.
- Excitement about agentic AI and the infrastructure challenges of making autonomous systems reliable when the stakes are real.
- A bias toward full ownership: you navigate ambiguity well and don’t wait for a roadmap to start solving problems.
- Bonus: experience building evaluation frameworks, working with agent/function\-calling architectures, familiarity with legal or other high\-stakes professional services domains, or time at early\-stage or hyper\-growth startups where the underlying technology changes regularly.
Compensation
================
$193,400 \- $290,000 USD
### Depending on your location, an Applicant Privacy Notice may apply to you. You can find all of our Applicant Privacy Notices \[here].
\#LI\-AK1
*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]
Salary Context
This $193K-$290K range is above the 75th percentile for AI Software Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $183K across 194 roles with salary data).
Role Details
About This Role
AI Software Engineers build the applications and systems that AI models run inside. They own the API layers, data pipelines, frontend integrations, and infrastructure that turn a model into a product users interact with. Every AI company needs engineers who can build the software around the AI.
The challenge is building reliable systems around inherently unreliable components. Models are probabilistic. They'll give different answers to the same question. They hallucinate. They're slow. They're expensive. Your job is to build an application layer that handles all of this gracefully while delivering a product that users trust and enjoy.
Across the 3,708 AI roles we're tracking, AI Software Engineer positions make up 7% of the market. At HARVEY, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
AI Software Engineer roles are among the most numerous in the AI job market. Every company deploying AI needs software engineers who understand AI integration patterns. The demand is broad, spanning startups to enterprises, across every industry adopting AI capabilities.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week includes: building API endpoints that serve model inference with caching and fallback logic, designing the data pipeline that feeds context to a RAG system, implementing streaming responses in the frontend, debugging a race condition in the async inference pipeline, and optimizing database queries for the vector search layer. It's full-stack engineering with AI at the center.
AI Software Engineer roles are among the most numerous in the AI job market. Every company deploying AI needs software engineers who understand AI integration patterns. The demand is broad, spanning startups to enterprises, across every industry adopting AI capabilities.
Skills in Demand for This Role
Full-stack engineering skills with AI integration experience. Python and TypeScript are the most common requirements. You'll need to understand API design, database architecture, and how to build reliable systems around probabilistic outputs. Experience with streaming, async processing, and caching patterns is increasingly important as real-time AI applications proliferate.
Knowledge of vector databases, embedding APIs, and LLM integration patterns (function calling, structured outputs, retry logic) differentiates AI software engineers from general software engineers. Understanding cost optimization (caching strategies, model routing, batched inference) is valuable since inference costs can dominate application economics.
Strong postings describe the product you'll be building, the AI integration patterns you'll work with, and the scale requirements. Look for companies that have existing AI features and need engineers to improve and expand them, not companies that are 'planning to add AI' someday.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI Software Engineer roles pay a median of $219,250 based on 424 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $230,000. This role's midpoint ($241K) sits 10% above the category median. Disclosed range: $193K to $290K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($300,000) and Research Engineer ($280,000). By seniority level: Entry: $120,000; Mid: $200,000; Senior: $230,000; Director: $272,150; VP: $250,000.
HARVEY AI Hiring
HARVEY has 3 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI Software Engineer, AI/ML Engineer. Based in New York, NY, US. Compensation range: $200K - $340K.
Location Context
AI roles in New York pay a median of $220,000 across 1,045 tracked positions.
Career Path
Common paths into AI Software Engineer roles include Software Engineer, Full-Stack Developer, Backend Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward Staff Engineer, AI Architect, Engineering Manager.
If you're a software engineer, you're already 80% there. Learn the AI integration patterns: RAG, streaming inference, function calling, structured outputs. Build a project that demonstrates you can wrap an AI model in a production-quality application with proper error handling, caching, and user experience. That's the portfolio piece that gets you hired.
What to Expect in Interviews
Technical screens look like standard software engineering interviews with an AI twist. Expect system design questions about building reliable applications around probabilistic models: handling streaming responses, implementing retry logic for API failures, and designing caching strategies for LLM outputs. Coding rounds test standard algorithms plus practical integration patterns like async processing and rate limiting.
When evaluating opportunities: Strong postings describe the product you'll be building, the AI integration patterns you'll work with, and the scale requirements. Look for companies that have existing AI features and need engineers to improve and expand them, not companies that are 'planning to add AI' someday.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 3,708 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 102 entry-level, 1,705 mid-level, 1,469 senior, and 432 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 14% of the market (508 positions). The remaining 3,180 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($300,000 median, 21 roles); Research Engineer ($280,000 median, 147 roles); AI Architect ($254,798 median, 67 roles).
AI Software Engineer roles are among the most numerous in the AI job market. Every company deploying AI needs software engineers who understand AI integration patterns. The demand is broad, spanning startups to enterprises, across every industry adopting AI capabilities.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 3,708 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,605), Data Scientist (310), AI Software Engineer (259). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (102) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,705) and senior (1,469) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 432 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 14% of all AI roles (508 positions), with 3,180 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $217,500. Top-quartile roles start at $272,100, and the 90th percentile reaches $325,000. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $300,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,890 postings), Aws (1,103 postings), Azure (877 postings), Rag (855 postings), Gcp (631 postings), Prompt Engineering (560 postings), Pytorch (545 postings), Claude (498 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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