Staff Research Scientist

Why Harvey

Harvey is a secure AI platform for professionals in law, tax, and finance that augments productivity and automates complex workflows. Harvey uses algorithms with reasoning-adept LLMs that have been customized and developed by our expert team of lawyers, engineers and research scientists. We’ve found product market fit and are scaling our team very quickly. Some reasons to join Harvey are:

• Exceptional product market fit: We have partnered with the largest law firms and professional service providers in the world, including Paul Weiss, A&O Shearman, Ashurst, O'Melveny & Myers, PwC, KKR, and many others.
• Strategic investors: Raised over $200 million from strategic investors including Sequoia, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and the OpenAI Startup Fund.
• World-class team: Harvey is hiring the best talent from DeepMind, Google Brain, Stripe, FAIR, Tesla Autopilot, Glean, Superhuman, Figma, and more.
• Partnerships: Our engineers and researchers work directly with OpenAI to build the future of generative AI and redefine professional services.
• Performance: $0-30M ARR in the last 18 months.
• Compensation: Top of market cash and equity compensation.

Role Overview

As a Staff Research Scientist on the Applied Research team at Harvey, you will research and develop improvements to our existing AI systems and design new AI-native features for our customers. We are looking for individuals with past research experience that are excited about translating research into tangible outcomes and new product experiences.

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

What You'll Do

Research Scientists at Harvey wear many hats. In this role, you may work on the following:

• Zero-to-one product development: rapidly prototype, evaluate, and integrate new product features and custom projects for our customers.
• Agent primitives: develop (and continuously improve) best-in-class LLM methods for zero-shot dense retrieval, large-scale hybrid semantic search, recursive abstractive document analysis, etc.
• Agentic workflows: design and implement LLM agents that use these basic primitives and external tools to deliver high-quality, long-form work outputs.
• Evaluation: Create rigorous evaluation protocols combining human preference judgements from domain experts and synthetic data generation.
• Custom models: Fine-tune LLMs and domain-specific embeddings models for knowledge work tasks.
• Technical leadership: As a Staff Research Scientist, you will technically lead members of our research team in executing large-scale and long-form projects in a given research area.

What You Have

Candidates should have 4+ years of experience (post-PhD), and must have operated in a Staff, Tech Lead, or Research Lead capacity in your prior work. Additionally, you may be a strong fit for this role if you:

• Are excited about redefining knowledge work through an AI-native lens.
• Can translate open-ended problems into actionable, short-term goals and execute on them aggressively.
• Communicate both low-level technical details and high-level strategic plans effectively.
• Maintain a high personal velocity.

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.