Research Engineer, Post-Training

Posted 2 Days Ago
Be an Early Applicant
San Francisco, CA, USA
Hybrid
231K-340K Annually
Mid level
Artificial Intelligence • Legal Tech • Professional Services • Software
The Role
Drive post-training experiments to improve agent performance for legal tasks: optimize harnesses, design grading/reward systems, study agent behavior, and collaborate with internal and external researchers to convert findings into training data, evals, and model improvements.
Summary Generated by Built In
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

Post-training is how Harvey turns expert feedback and agent traces into models that are meaningfully better at legal work. We are looking for a research engineer who can help scale that loop: defining and running model training experiments, interpreting results, and working with internal and external research partners to build better data, environments, graders, and training recipes.

This role is for someone who can self-manage model training and applied research projects. You will work closely with internal and external research collaborators on post-training efforts that matter to our product roadmap. The ideal candidate has extensive hands-on experience training open weight models, either in a research or production setting, and enough engineering depth to run and debug experiments efficiently.

What You'll Do
  • Drive post-training experiments, pushing agent performance while navigating the Pareto frontier of cost, latency, security, and governance.

  • Optimize agent harnesses, including domain-specific skills, tools, subagents, retrieval strategies, and validation loops that improve quality on long-horizon legal work.

  • Design and develop grading and reward systems that are reliable enough for evaluation, efficient enough for iteration, and strict enough for high-stakes legal work.

  • Study agent behavior, identifying patterns that correlate with successful work product, and converting those findings into training data, evals, or harness changes.

  • Work with Harvey researchers and external research partners to define experiments, evaluate methodology, review results, and keep projects moving toward concrete model improvements.

What You Have
  • Hands-on experience with post-training or model-training work, such as SFT, preference optimization, RLHF/RLAIF, reward modeling, distillation, or adapting open-weight models to specialized domains.

  • Strong judgment about model behavior: you can read traces, inspect outputs, identify failure modes, and reason about whether a metric is measuring the thing that matters.

  • Strong Python and research-engineering ability. You can write clean code, debug experiments, and build the simple but reliable systems needed to make research move faster.

  • Ability to self-manage ambiguous applied research projects and communicate clearly with researchers, engineers, product teams, domain experts, and external partners.

Nice to Have

  • Experience building data or evaluation infrastructure for ML workflows, such as dataset curation pipelines, model-output processing, experiment tracking, evaluation dashboards, or regression analysis tooling.

  • Experience with distributed training, inference systems, GPU workloads, or large-scale ML experimentation.

  • Research publications, open-source contributions, or shipped industry work in LLMs, agents, evaluation, or ML systems.

Compensation

$231,000 - $340,000

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]

Skills Required

  • Hands-on experience with post-training or model-training work (SFT, preference optimization, RLHF/RLAIF, reward modeling, distillation, or adapting open-weight models)
  • Strong judgment about model behavior; ability to read traces, inspect outputs, identify failure modes, and evaluate metrics
  • Strong Python and research-engineering ability to write clean code, debug experiments, and build reliable research systems
  • Ability to self-manage ambiguous applied research projects and communicate clearly with researchers, engineers, product teams, domain experts, and external partners
  • Experience building data or evaluation infrastructure for ML workflows (dataset curation pipelines, model-output processing, experiment tracking, evaluation dashboards)
  • Experience with distributed training, inference systems, GPU workloads, or large-scale ML experimentation
  • Research publications, open-source contributions, or shipped industry work in LLMs, agents, evaluation, or ML systems

Harvey Compensation & Benefits Highlights

The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Harvey and has not been reviewed or approved by Harvey.

  • Healthcare Strength Healthcare coverage is described as comprehensive, spanning medical, dental, vision, mental health support, and fertility benefits. This breadth indicates robust health protections within the total rewards package.
  • Parental & Family Support Paid parental leave is prominently offered with eligibility starting on day one. Family-building support complements leave policies to support different life stages.
  • Equity Value & Accessibility Equity is routinely positioned alongside competitive cash, with communications emphasizing pre-IPO upside. This signals meaningful access to ownership as part of compensation.

Harvey Insights

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The Company
HQ: San Francisco, California
373 Employees
Year Founded: 2022

What We Do

Harvey is a generative AI company backed by Sequoia and OpenAI's startup fund building the future of professional services.

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