Principal Software Engineer- CD
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 24, 2026. First seen by Alion on Aug 27, 2026. Harness scores A on the Alion truth index.
Harness is the AI Software Delivery Platform company, led by technologist and entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal (founder of AppDynamics, acquired by Cisco for $3.7B). Harness has raised approximately $570M in funding and is valued at $5.5B, backed by leading investors including Goldman Sachs, Menlo Ventures, IVP, Unusual Ventures, Citi Ventures, and more. As AI accelerates code creation, the real bottleneck has shifted to everything after the code - testing, deployments, application security, reliability, compliance, and cost optimization. Harness brings AI and automation to this “outer loop,” helping teams ship software faster while maintaining security and governance throughout the entire software delivery lifecycle.
Powered by Harness AI and the Software Delivery Knowledge Graph, the Harness Platform applies deep context and intelligent automation across the software delivery lifecycle with governance and policy-driven controls embedded throughout the platform.
Over the past year, Harness powered over 185M deployments, 82M builds, 18T flag evaluations, 8M security scans, 9.1B optimized tests, 3T protected API calls, and helped manage $2.8B in cloud spend - enabling customers like United Airlines, Morningstar, and Choice Hotels to accelerate releases by up to 75%, reduce cloud costs by up to 60%, and achieve 10x DevOps efficiency.
With a global team across 26 offices and 27 countries, Harness is shaping the future of AI software delivery - and we’re looking for exceptional talent to help us move even faster.
Position Summary
The Harness Engineering team is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead complex cross platform initiatives and lead technical projects across geographies. Principal Engineers are recognized experts in Harness’ technology domain, and represent the senior technical leadership within their organization. Principal Engineers carry the responsibility of steering the course for their organizational segment, partnering with senior leadership, prioritizing initiatives to achieve a range of objectives.
Principal Engineers at Harness
Poses a careful blend of domain specific engineering expertise and world class technical leadership. There are a number of competencies that a Principal Engineer must display.
- Technical Competencies
- In depth tactical knowledge of the domain, yet broad experience and skill sets
- Domain and product expert when representing harness with customers and internal teams alike.
- Seamlessly include, promote and balance cross functional inputs from Product, Design, Enablement
- Break down complex technical requirements to motivate and lead cross-functional teams
- Consider the execution needed today, into the future, make investments aligned with broader impact
- Leadership Competencies
- Demonstrable experience in executing on one, or multiple roadmap through working with others, finding the ROI in organized efforts
- Subject matter and domain expertise applied to develop others internal and external to Harness
- In depth understanding of product features and roadmaps, how customers engage with the product in your space
- Clear displays of improving execution via process optimization, or other means
- Natural advisor to leadership on resourcing constraints, efficiencies.
- Practice and evangelize Harness core values
- Participate and contribute to Architecture Committees, Hiring Committees, and others that are formed to solve issues across the org, and company
Key Responsibilities
- Coordinates and proposes collaborative efforts across multiple teams in engineering, guiding team members to make well-informed decisions that align with the strategic plans of the respective sub-department.
- Proactively seeks to prevent redundant efforts, taking existing assets and hardening them for broad re-usability
- Apply your expertise in a mentorship capacity, to others in the organization. Champion a culture of improvement.
- Participate in resource planning, project mapping, and success criteria for large engineering initiatives
- Responds swiftly to the needs of today. Plan diligently for the needs of tomorrow
- Solve the most difficult technical problems at Harness.
- Interfaces with senior engineering leadership on project deliverables and planning. Create visibility and presents to executives when needed
- Lead and inspire innovation at the highest order across Harness’ portfolio of products and services
- Propose POCs and optimizations regularly
- Align the goals of module sub-teams with the overall goals of Harness Engineering
- Gather escalations from your project team, remove blockers, enable your project team, broker solutions with cross functional engineering leadership
- Represent your project to external customers, partners or other stakeholders.
- You are the Harness SME for most, if not all domains in your area of expertise
About You
- 12+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- Knowledge of object-oriented design, data structures, and algorithms
- Deep hands-on technical expertise in at least one major technical area: Modern Software Delivery, building complex distributed systems
- Demonstrable experience in advanced Java, Golang, or comparable programing languages.
- Depth of experience in distributed systems
- Advanced Computer Science degree, or equivalent experience.
Work Location
- This position is a hybrid role that will require the person to work from our Bangalore Office 3 days a week.
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
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
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.
At Harness, we care about your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal data. For additional information on this topic, you can visit our privacy Portal: https://harness-privacy.relyance.ai/
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 [email protected]. 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.