Harness is led by technologist and entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, founder of App Dynamics (acquired by Cisco for $3.7B). The company has raised ~$240M in Series E venture funding, is valued at $5.5B, and backed by top investors including Goldman Sachs, Menlo Ventures, IVP, Google Ventures, J.P. Morgan, Capital One Ventures, Citi Ventures, Service Now, Splunk Ventures and more. Harness is building the industry’s leading AI-powered software delivery platform, enabling teams worldwide to build, test, and deliver software faster, safer, and more reliably. Writing code is only 30–40% of the engineering lifecycle — the rest involves testing, deployments, security, compliance, and optimization. Harness brings AI and automation to this outer loop, turning complex, time-consuming workflows into streamlined processes at massive global scale.

The platform includes industry leading products in CI/CD, Feature Flags, Cloud Cost Management, Service Reliability, Chaos Engineering, Software Engineering Insights, Internal Developer Experience, and API discovery, observability, governance, and runtime protection. Over the past year, Harness powered 128M deployments, 81M builds, 1.2T API calls protected, and $1.9B in cloud spend optimized, helping customers like United Airlines and Choice Hotels accelerate releases by up to 75% and achieve 10x DevOps efficiency. With employees in over 25 countries, Harness is shaping the future of AI-driven software delivery — and we’re looking for exceptional talent to help us move even faster.

Position Summary

We are seeking a Principal Customer Architect (Forward Deployed Engineer) to join our Customer Success team. In this role, you will act as a technical expert embedded with our customers to ensure they realize maximum value from our platform. You will configure and optimize platforms for client use cases, build workflows around real user needs, drive product adoption, and keep customer deployments healthy. As a strategic technical advisor, you will enable customers through hands-on support and guidance, helping them achieve their business outcomes while maintaining high satisfaction. This role reports directly to the Director, Customer Architect and will collaborate closely with Customer Success Architects, Product, Engineering, and other cross-functional teams to deliver results.

About the role

• Technical Enablement & Customer Adoption: Lead technical onboarding and enablement programs to drive high customer adoption and satisfaction. Provide best-practice guidance and hands-on support so customers fully leverage our solutions, aiming to maintain over 90% product adoption in each account.

• Strategic Advisory: Serve as a trusted technical advisor to customer teams, understanding their goals and challenges. Influence key stakeholders by articulating how our platform aligns with their business objectives, and guide them on strategic infrastructure improvements to achieve desired outcomes.

• Business Value Reviews (BVRs): Plan and deliver regular Business Value Reviews to demonstrate progress toward customers’ goals, product usage, and realized value. Prepare compelling presentations (using Google Slides and other tools) to highlight ROI, technical achievements, and next-step recommendations.

• Churn Analysis & Customer Success: Proactively monitor customer health and usage metrics. Perform churn analysis to identify at-risk accounts and technical pain points. Work with customers to resolve issues, optimize their implementations, and ensure technical success — thereby maintaining an Annual Gross Retention Rate (AGRR) above 90%.

• Infrastructure as Code Management (IaCM): Deliver hands-on support in the Infrastructure-as-Code module. Help customers implement and manage IaC solutions to automate their cloud infrastructure on platforms like AWS and GCP.

• Internal Developer Platforms (IDP): Guide customers in building and improving Internal Developer Platforms on Kubernetes. Assist with setting up CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration, and developer self-service workflows.

• Emerging Technology Enablement: Contribute your expertise to new domains such as Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI), Cloud Cost Management (CCM), and Customer Engineering (CE). Help customers adopt these emerging solutions by providing architectural guidance and hands-on assistance.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Act as the voice of the customer internally. Work with Product and Engineering teams to translate feedback into improvements, influence roadmaps, and troubleshoot complex issues. Partner with Customer Success Managers and Sales to strategize on account plans, renewals, and expansion.

We are looking for candidates with a strong technical foundation in modern DevOps practices and tools, particularly in areas related to Infrastructure as Code and Internal Developer Platforms.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

• Hands-on experience with Terraform for managing cloud infrastructure

• Design and reuse of IaC modules across environments

• Proficiency with AWS and GCP, including networking, compute, IAM, and security

• Familiarity with Terragrunt, CDK, Cloud Formation or similar IaC automation frameworks

• Familiarity with Ansible or similar configuration management frameworks

Internal Developer Platforms (IDP)

• Deep understanding of Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, or self-managed clusters)

• Experience with Helm, Kustomize, and other K8s tools

• Workflow orchestrations using CI/CD tools

• Knowledge of developer self-service workflows and platform engineering principles

Automation

• Proficiency in Python, Bash, or Go for scripting and automation

• Experience setting up comprehensive logging, alerting, and performance dashboards

Security & Governance

• Understanding of security best practices for infrastructure and DevOps tooling

• Exposure to tools like OPA/Gatekeeper, Hashi Corp Vault, or equivalent

Soft Skills

• Strong customer empathy and consultative mindset

• Ability to explain complex technical architectures to a non-technical audience

• Excellent collaboration and documentation habits

About you

• Senior-level experience (typically 5+ years) in DevOps, SRE, or related engineering roles

• Strong communication and presentation skills with the ability to influence stakeholders

• Experience in customer-facing technical roles (e.g. Solutions Architect, CSE, Professional Services) is a plus

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience)

• Relevant certifications (e.g. AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform) are advantageous

• Success in this role will be measured by high customer adoption, AGRR above 90%, and the quality of enablement and strategic guidance delivered.

Work Location

• Remote
• U.S.

What you will have at Harness

• Competitive salary

• Comprehensive healthcare benefits

• Flexible Spending Account (FSA)

• Flexible work schedule

• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)

• Flexible Time Off and Parental Leave

• Monthly, quarterly, and annual social and team building events

• Monthly internet reimbursement

Pay transparency
$165,000—$195,000 USD

Harness in the news:

• Accelerating Our Mission to Bring AI to Everything After Code

• Goldman Sachs leads investment in software delivery startup Harness at $5.5 billion valuation

• How Harness runs 16 “startups within a startup” at scale | Jyoti Bansal

• Harness Research Shows AI Visibility Crisis Fueling Security Nightmare

• Harness has been named to the Inc. Power Partner list for software delivery success

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

Note on Fraudulent Recruiting/Offers

We have become aware that there may be fraudulent recruiting attempts being made by people posing as representatives of Harness. These scams may involve fake job postings, unsolicited emails, or messages claiming to be from our recruiters or hiring managers.

Please note, we do not ask for sensitive or financial information via chat, text, or social media, and any email communications will come from the domain @harness.io. Additionally, Harness will never ask for any payment, fee to be paid, or purchases to be made by a job applicant. All applicants are encouraged to apply directly to our open jobs via our website. Interviews are generally conducted via Zoom video conference unless the candidate requests other accommodations.

If you believe that you have been the target of an interview/offer scam by someone posing as a representative of Harness, please do not provide any personal or financial information and contact us immediately at security@harness.io. You can also find additional information about this type of scam and report any fraudulent employment offers via the Federal Trade Commission’s website (https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/job-scams)), or you can contact your local law enforcement agency.