Staff Software Engineer - Platform Foundations

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 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. 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, OpenTelemetry, 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. About You 10 -14 years of experience in backend platform engineering, distributed systems, and microservices. Strong programming expertise in Go, Java, or Py ... (truncated, view full listing at source)