Staff Developer Productivity Engineer
Harness is led by technologist and entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, founder of AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco for $3.7B). The company has raised ~$570M in Series E venture funding, is valued at $5.5B, and backed by top investors including Goldman Sachs, Menlo Ventures, IVP, Google Ventures, J.P. Morgan, Capital One Ventures, Citi Ventures, ServiceNow, Splunk Ventures and more. Harness is building the industry’s leading AI-powered software delivery platform, enabling teams worldwide to build, test, and deliver software faster, safer, and more reliably. Writing code is only 30–40% of the engineering lifecycle — the rest involves testing, deployments, security, compliance, and optimization. Harness brings AI and automation to this outer loop, turning complex, time-consuming workflows into streamlined processes at massive global scale.
The platform includes industry leading products in CI/CD, Feature Flags, Cloud Cost Management, Service Reliability, Chaos Engineering, Software Engineering Insights, Internal Developer Experience, and API discovery, observability, governance, and runtime protection. Over the past year, Harness powered 128M deployments, 81M builds, 1.2T API calls protected, and $1.9B in cloud spend optimized, helping customers like United Airlines and Choice Hotels accelerate releases by up to 75% and achieve 10x DevOps efficiency. With employees in over 25 countries, Harness is shaping the future of AI-driven software delivery — and we’re looking for exceptional talent to help us move even faster.
The Opportunity & Your Impact
We seek a hands-on Staff Developer Productivity Engineer with 8+ years of experience who is passionate about enabling developers. This role requires technical mastery of CI/CD and build systems combined with a servant leadership mindset. You measure your success by developer satisfaction, velocity improvements, and eliminated toil—not by features shipped or systems built. You will drive adoption of cutting-edge technologies, including LLMs, to systematically eliminate repetitive work and restore developer flow.
Key Responsibilities
Servant Leadership & Developer Enablement: Act as a trusted advisor and champion for development teams. Deeply understand developer pain points, eliminate friction, and enable engineers to focus on delivering value. Listen actively, translate feedback into platform improvements, and ensure no developer waits unnecessarily or struggles with broken tooling.
LLM/AI Integration: Drive research and productionization of LLMs and AI tools to reduce developer cognitive load. Focus on code generation, intelligent testing, auto-documentation, and automated troubleshooting. Partner with developers to automate their most painful, repetitive tasks.
Architecture & Platform Development: Design and implement local development environments, build systems, test infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and delivery systems with one principle: minimize developer friction. Build core developer tools (code coverage, code review, test frameworks, artifact management) that are intuitive, reliable, and fast.
CI/CD & Build Optimization: Lead continuous improvement of internal CI/CD pipelines (Harness Platform) to eliminate wait times and restore developer flow. Implement advanced caching, parallelization, and build graph optimizations to dramatically reduce cycle times and give developers back hours each day.
Quality Without Friction: Integrate code coverage and static/dynamic analysis tools that provide fast feedback and actionable insights. Design quality gates that protect production while respecting developer workflows and autonomy.
Technical Leadership: Mentor small engineering teams from new graduates to experienced engineers. Remove blockers, provide context, and create space for growth. Present technical guidance clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate across teams to deliver features that serve developer needs. Champion developer concerns in technical and business discussions, ensuring their voices are heard and time is respected.
Continuous Improvement: Proactively identify workflow improvements by spending time with developers and observing their struggles. Own projects end-to-end while maintaining a feedback loop with the developers you serve.
Metrics & Observability: Track developer productivity metrics (DORA metrics, build times, deployment frequency, developer satisfaction). Implement monitoring and tracing for platform reliability. Use data to identify where platforms fail developers, not to judge performance.
Required Qualifications
Experience: 8+ years in software engineering with 4+ years focused on Developer Productivity, DevOps, or Platform Engineering. Track record of measurably improving developer satisfaction, reducing toil, or saving team time.
Technical Expertise:
- Strong Development experience
- Proficiency in Go, Python, or Java; strong shell scripting skills
- Deep CI/CD experience at scale (Harness Platform knowledge a plus); familiarity with CircleCI, ArgoCD
- Extensive build tool expertise (Maven, Gradle, Bazel, Buck, Pants) with proven optimization results
- Solid Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm knowledge for consistent developer environments
- Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
- Familiarity with NodeJS/NextJS and modern web development tooling
Leadership & Mindset:
- Demonstrated servant leadership—consistently prioritizing developer needs over personal goals
- Ability to build trust, listen without defensiveness, and remove obstacles for others
- Strong communication skills; can explain complexity to non-technical stakeholders while advocating for developers
- Influence through empathy and demonstrated value; can say "no" to requests that harm developer experience
Desired Qualifications
- Experience integrating LLM APIs or code assistants (Copilot, internal LLMs) with measurable productivity gains
- Experience scaling products at hyper-growth startups while maintaining developer velocity
- Security tooling integration (Shift-Left) while minimizing developer friction and false positives
- Track record of building trust-based relationships with high emotional intelligence
- Experience with office hours, self-service documentation, or internal developer community building
- English fluency for global team communication
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.
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.
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