Staff Software Engineer - Platform Foundations
Harness
Software Engineering
California, USA
Posted on Mar 6, 2026
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 14 offices and 25 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
We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer with deep expertise in distributed systems, microservices architecture, and cloud-native backend engineering. This role requires strong operational excellence, ensuring system reliability, scalability, and observability while driving best practices in incident management, performance tuning, and automation.
Key Responsibilities
System Architecture & Scalability
$181,000—$226,000 USD
Harness In The News
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.
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 14 offices and 25 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
We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer with deep expertise in distributed systems, microservices architecture, and cloud-native backend engineering. This role requires strong operational excellence, ensuring system reliability, scalability, and observability while driving best practices in incident management, performance tuning, and automation.
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.
- 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, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Datadog.
- 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.
- 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.
- 10 -14 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).
- Proven ability to manage production incidents and other operatonal excellence practices.
- Excellent debugging and problem-solving skills in complex, distributed environments.
- US - Remote
- 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
$181,000—$226,000 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
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.