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 looking for an experienced Staff Software Engineer 2 to design, develop, and optimize highly scalable and distributed systems. The ideal candidate should have strong expertise in Java and Go, along with deep knowledge of distributed computing principles, cloud-native architectures, and scalable backend services.
This role requires strong operational excellence, ensuring system reliability, scalability, and observability while driving best practices in incident management, performance tuning, and automation. You will work closely with cross-functional teams to build resilient, high-performance applications. Experience with CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure) will be a plus.

Key Responsibilities:

System Architecture & Scalability:

Design & Build: Architect and develop scalable, fault-tolerant backend systems that handle millions of requests per second.
Microservices Development: Implement microservices using Go, Java, or Python, ensuring high availability and resilience.
Cloud & Kubernetes: Deploy and manage applications on AWS, GCP, or Azure with Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS).
Event-Driven Architectures: Work with Kafka, Pulsar, RabbitMQ for distributed
messaging and streaming workloads.
Develop observability, logging, and monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, and Open Telemetry.
Troubleshoot complex issues in high-traffic, production-scale environments.
Mentor junior engineers and help define best coding practices, architectural patterns, and system design principles.

Operational Excellence & Incident Management:

Reliability & Resilience: Implement best practices for graceful degradation, retries, circuit breakers, and auto-scaling.
Incident Response & On-Call Management: Define SLAs/SLIs/SLOs, set up robust alerting & escalation processes for incident handling.
Postmortems & RCA (Root Cause Analysis): Lead post-incident analysis, drive corrective actions, and improve system reliability.
Observability & Monitoring: Define and implement logging, monitoring, and distributed tracing using Prometheus, Open Telemetry, Grafana, Datadog.

Performance Optimization & Security:

Performance Tuning: Diagnose and optimize latency, throughput, and memory utilization for large-scale distributed systems.
Multithreading & Concurrency: Design and implement highly concurrent, multithreaded backend services for parallel processing.
Database & Storage Optimization: Improve performance of SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (Cassandra, DynamoDB, Redis, MongoDB) solutions.
Security & Compliance: Implement API security, authentication, authorization, and ensure compliance with SOC2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS.

Leadership & Collaboration:

Mentorship & Code Reviews: Guide engineers in best practices for platform engineering, microservices, and distributed systems.
Cross-Team Collaboration: Work with cloud engineering, security, and product engineering teams to align platform capabilities with business needs.

Key Qualifications:

8-12 years of experience in backend platform engineering, distributed systems, and microservices.
Strong programming expertise in Go, Java, or Python, with a focus on multithreading and concurrency.
Expertise in Kubernetes, service meshes (Istio, Linkerd), and cloud infrastructure.
Deep understanding of gRPC, REST APIs, GraphQL, and API performance tuning.
Hands-on experience with CI/CD and infrastructure automation (Terraform, Pulumi).
Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and Helm in cloud environments.
Solid understanding of networking, API gateways, and authentication mechanisms (OAuth, JWT, gRPC, REST, GraphQL).
Ability to debug and optimize high-concurrency, low-latency applications.
Strong problem-solving and analytical skills in complex, distributed environments.
Proven ability to manage production incidents and other operational excellence practices.

Location

This role will be out of our Bangalore, India office.

What You Will Have At Harness:

Experience building a transformative product
End-to-end ownership of your projects
Competitive salary
Comprehensive healthcare benefit
Flexible work schedule
Quarterly Harness TGIF-Off / 4 days

Paid Time Off and Parental Leave:

Monthly, quarterly, and annual social and team building events
Monthly internet reimbursement
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.