Staff Software Engineer, Agents

Harvey

$231K — $340K *
Legal & Accounting
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of software engineering experience (post-BS/MS)
  • Proficient in Python, familiar with LLM APIs and agent frameworks
  • Experience shipping user-facing products, backend or full-stack
  • Demonstrated passion for building effective domain-specific agents
  • Ability to adapt and implement new best practices in code and frameworks
  • Iterative mindset for developing proof of concepts and delivering early versions

Responsibilities

  • Partner with customers and PMs to design evaluations capturing excellence in legal workflows
  • Optimize agent performance using prompt engineering and model selection
  • Implement low-latency execution infrastructure for agents in collaboration with the model infra team
  • Enhance observability and instrumentation to profile agents and identify optimization areas
  • Stay updated on advancements in agentic systems to inform product development

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health insurance
  • Opportunity for flexible work arrangements
  • Collaborative and innovative work environment
  • Access to professional development and training programs
  • Potential for career growth across multiple levels
Full Job Description
Role Overview

As a Software Engineer, Agents, you'll build the systems that make our AI agents indispensable to legal professionals.

You will design environments and actions for agentic professional work, make model selection decisions, manage context windows, create optimal tools, and develop evals that enable faster iteration loops to unlock new capabilities.

We're looking for engineers and researchers who are immersed in the space, driven to ship impactful products, and are experienced in using practical evaluations to drive task completion quality and customer delight.

Representative Projects
  • Save weeks of effort on high pressure M&A deals by automating information requests and diligence checks across hundreds of thousands of files with retrieval and file editing agents.
  • Dramatically speed up deal turnaround speed by improving the latency and quality of agents on applying a standard legal "playbook" to contracts.
  • Ensure that our clients win their complex, data-hungry litigation cases by optimizing our multi-source retrieval agents.
  • Enable board-ready PowerPoint generation by tuning the harness and libraries for coding agents.


What You'll Do
  • Partner with customers and PMs to understand legal workflows, design practical evaluations that capture what "excellent" means, and ship agents that get the job done.
  • Optimize agent performance through prompt engineering, model selection, tool design, skill writing, context window management, and eval harness development.
  • Work with our model infra team to design and implement infrastructure for low-latency agent execution, including caching strategies, parallel tool calls, or subagent patterns.
  • Improve our observability and instrumentation to profile agent behavior, identify bottlenecks, and drive optimization decisions.
  • Stay current on new developments in agentic systems and bring those learnings back to the products we build.


What You Have
  • Passion for building effective domain-specific agents.
  • Iterative mindset: you develop proof of concepts, make decisions quickly, and ship v0s.
  • Comfortable with when and how to use evaluations to drive quality.
  • Humble and adaptable about code and frameworks. We expect you to drive adoption of new best practices as they develop.
  • 8+ years (post-BS/MS) of software engineering experience.
  • We are hiring for this role across Mid, Senior, and Staff levels.
  • Proficiency in Python and experience working with LLM APIs and agent frameworks.
  • Experience with shipping user-facing products, either on the backend or full-stack.


Compensation Range

$231,000 - $340,000 USD

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