Staff Software Engineer - CD

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.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Security best practices in distributed systems.
• Contributions to open-source projects in the Java or Go ecosystem.

Why Join Us?

• Work on cutting-edge high-scale distributed systems in a fast-paced, innovative environment.
• Collaborate with some of the best minds in the industry.
• Competitive compensation, benefits, and growth opportunities.
• If you are passionate about building high-performance, cloud-native, and scalable distributed systems, we'd love to hear from you!