Staff Software Engineer - Platform

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 a Staff Backend Platform 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.
  
  

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).
• Proven ability to manage production incidents and other operatonal excellence practices.
• Excellent debugging and problem-solving skills in complex, distributed environments.
  
  

Harness In The News

• 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 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.