Harness is a high-growth company that is disrupting the software delivery market. Our mission is to enable the 30 million software developers in the world to deliver code to their users reliably, efficiently, securely and quickly, increasing customers’ pace of innovation while improving the developer experience. We offer solutions for every step of the software delivery lifecycle to build, test, secure, deploy and manage reliability, feature flags and cloud costs. The Harness Software Delivery Platform includes modules for CI, CD, Cloud Cost Management, Feature Flags, Service Reliability Management, Security Testing Orchestration, Chaos Engineering, Software Engineering Insights and continues to expand at an incredibly fast pace.
Harness is led by technologist and entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, who founded AppDynamics and sold it to Cisco for $3.7B. We’re backed with $425M in venture financing from top-tier VC and strategic firms, including J.P. Morgan, Capital One Ventures, Citi Ventures, ServiceNow, Splunk Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Adage Capital Partners, Balyasny Asset Management, Gaingels, Harmonic Growth Partners, Menlo Ventures, IVP, Unusual Ventures, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Alkeon Capital, Battery Ventures, Sorenson Capital, Thomvest Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank.
About the Role
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 OpenTelemetry.
- 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, 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.
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.
- Harness Grabs a $150m Line of Credit
- Welcome Split!
- SF Business Times - 2024 - 100 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in the Bay Area
- Forbes - 2024 America's Best Startup Employers
- SF Business Times - 2024 Fastest Growing Private Companies Awards
- Fast Co - 2024 100 Best Workplaces for Innovators
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 [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.
Top Skills
What We Do
Harness is a leader in AI-native software delivery, dedicated to empowering developers and engineering teams worldwide. We revolutionize how software is built, tested, deployed, and optimized by driving efficiency, reliability, and speed throughout the software development lifecycle. At Harness, we envision a world where developers focus on innovation, free from repetitive tasks, supported by tools that streamline every step.
Our platform leverages AI and automation across all key pillars of software delivery: Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Feature Flags and Experimentation, Cloud Cost Management, Security Testing, and more. By automating traditionally manual processes that slow down engineering teams, Harness enables organizations to release software faster, reduce errors, and optimize costs—all while enhancing the developer experience and flexibility.
Harness is transforming software delivery on a global scale. As a pioneer in AI-driven automation, we streamline complex development processes, eliminate inefficiencies, and empower developers to innovate freely. Our mission is ambitious: enabling millions of developers to deliver code faster, more reliably, and with greater ease than ever before.
Why Work With Us
Harness is built on a culture of growth, collaboration, and transparency, where team members are encouraged to push boundaries and solve meaningful challenges. We invest in personal and professional development, value work-life balance, and foster a supportive environment—making Harness an ideal place to make a real impact in tech.
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