Forward Deployed Engineer - DevOps/SRE

About the job

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 26 offices and 27 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 seeking an experienced, highly technical and customer-centric Forward Deployed Engineer - DevOps/SRE to join our Customer Success team. In this role, you will play a crucial role as a technical solution expert and advisor working closely with some of the largest Harness AppSec customers to design, implement and optimize Harness platform and adoption strategies to ensure they realize maximum value and outcomes.

Our team is small, collaborative, and deeply motivated — we work at the intersection of technology, security, and business, and we bring curiosity and rigor to a wide range of challenges. You will have the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to a rapidly growing company while helping customers harness the power of our AI-enabled DevSecOps platform to build and deliver software securely and efficiently — including protecting AI applications from emerging threats.

We prioritize psychological safety, mentorship, and continuous learning. Whether you're coming from engineering, architecture, consulting, or security — we want to hear from you.

About the role

- Serve as the primary technical owner of customer implementations and adoption programs across the Harness AppSec portfolio, developing deep familiarity with each customer's environment, goals, and success criteria

- Provide hands-on technical guidance and consulting to customers throughout the customer lifecycle, from onboarding and implementation to adoption and value realization.

- Develop strategic account success plans to ensure successful operationalization and value realization and drive alignment with all levels of customer leadership.

- Develop and maintain a deep understanding of Harness platform and AppSec modules as well as general skillset across AI applications and security, DevOps, SecOps, application security, cloud architectures, networks and infrastructure disciplines and industry trends to effectively support, educate and advise customers.

- Proactively analyze customer usage data to surface trends, adoption gaps, and optimization opportunities — delivering actionable recommendations across technology, process, and people dimensions.

- Bring constructive feedback from customers to product management to improve the solution, and collaborate with cross-functional teams, including sales, product, and engineering, to drive the successful adoption, integration, and ongoing optimization of our solution.

- Conduct regular business reviews and check-ins with customers to ensure their ongoing success and satisfaction, addressing any concerns or issues in a timely and effective manner.

- Proactively identify at-risk accounts by performing churn and adoption analysis to ensure target product adoption and business (AGRR) goals are met.

- Contribute to the development and refinement of customer success processes, tools, and resources to continuously improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our customer success delivery methodologies and collateral.

- Participate in Harness Community forums and help build reference architectures, best-practice guides, and enablement content

About you

- 7+ years of experience in software engineering, solutions architecture, technical consulting, security engineering, or technical account management within the software or technology industry.

- 5+ years of experience with some multiple of the following solutions preferred:

- Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, GCP, Azure, Terraform, CloudFormation, Linux

- Containers & Orchestration: Kubernetes, Helm, Kustomize, OpenShift, PCF

- CI/CD & DevOps: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Harness Pipelines, Jira, ServiceNow.

- Languages & Scripting: Python, Bash, YAML, Go (a plus).

- Application Security : SAST, DAST, SCA, IAST, SBOM generation, API security testing, pen testing fundamentals, SIEM (Splunk, Datadog), SOAR platforms.

- Prior experience in security engineering and architecture, application security, API and AI security, development, DevOps, SecOps, or web security is preferred.

- Ability to quickly learn, understand, and work with new emerging technologies and solutions in the AI, DevOps, Cloud and Security space.

- Exceptional interpersonal, communication, and relationship-building skills, with a proven ability to manage complex customer relationships and communicate business and technical value to all levels of management.

- Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills, with the ability to quickly diagnose and resolve technical issues.

- Detail-oriented and highly organized, with the ability to manage multiple priorities and deadlines simultaneously.

- Comfortable working in a fast-paced, dynamic environment, with a strong commitment to continuous learning and growth.

- Bachelor's degree in a related field, such as Computer Science, Information Technology, or Engineering is preferred

Must Have Skills

- Kubernetes eco system expertise (k8s, helm, release, upgrade, troubleshooting etc)

- In depth Cloud experience - AWS is a must (GCP, Azure good to have) - infra provisioning, VPC++ ,EKS, S3, EBS ,EFS, EC2 etc

- Linux ecosystem

- Troubleshooting skills for the above

- Programming (Scripting) experience along with ability to write custom integrations or tailored

Pay transparency $180,000 — $202,000 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

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

At Harness, we care about your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal data. For additional information on this topic, you can visit our privacy Portal: https://harness-privacy.relyance.ai/

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.