Staff Software Engineer

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

Build Distributed Systems at Global Scale - Join Harness Feature Management & Experimentation (FME)

Last year, the Harness FME platform evaluated 4 trillion feature flags. For most people, that’s just an impressive number. For a scale-minded builder and engineering leader, it represents one of the most demanding challenges in distributed systems.

To power this scale, we’ve built:

• Massive global concurrency supporting millions of real-time decisions.
• Millisecond-level latency through a globally distributed feature flag delivery network.
• Tier-one enterprise reliability trusted by the world’s most sophisticated companies.

About the Role:

• Design and develop scalable backend services using Java/Golang
• Architect and maintain distributed microservices-based systems.
• Build reliable APIs and internal platform services using REST(gorilla.mux, alice.chains) and gRPC. 
• Optimize system performance across compute, memory, storage, and networking layers.
• Work with PostgreSQL, Redis, S3, and AWS cloud infrastructure.
• Deploy and manage cloud-native applications using Docker and Kubernetes.
• Troubleshoot complex production and infrastructure-level issues.
• Drive engineering best practices, code quality, and system reliability.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to technical leadership across teams.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to deliver scalable and resilient solutions.

About you

• 8-11 years of software engineering experience with strong proficiency in Go, C++ and Java.
• Deep understanding of computer science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, concurrency, memory management, CPU/process architecture, containers, cgroups, and filesystems.
• Strong experience designing and building scalable distributed systems and microservices architectures.
• Hands-on expertise with PostgreSQL (including pgx driver), Redis, and object storage systems such as S3.
• Solid experience working within AWS environments and familiarity with core cloud infrastructure concepts including VPCs, load balancers, auto scaling, and compute instances. Exposure to Azure or GCP is a plus.
• Experience building and operating cloud-native applications using Docker, Docker Compose, Kubernetes, and related orchestration tooling.
• Strong understanding of API design and backend communication patterns, including
• REST APIs, gRPC, and middleware frameworks such as gorilla/mux and alice.
• Proficient with Git-based development workflows and modern software delivery practices.
• Excellent debugging and problem-solving skills, including the ability to diagnose infrastructure, networking, and system-level issues beyond application code.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with the ability to operate independently in fast-paced engineering environments.
• Proven experience mentoring engineers, driving technical discussions, and leading initiatives across teams

Nice-to-have :

• Prior experience writing security policies for API gateways or load balancers.
• Contributions to open-source projects.

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
• 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.

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.