Engineering Manager - Data Platform

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 25 countries, Harness is shaping the future of AI software delivery — and we’re looking for exceptional talent to help us move even faster.

Build foundational JD linking to Career ladder https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CilQuvhiASN95WtGgOks3B6MTsbpZhoA5b8EwaNclLo/edit?tab=t.sc3zeyj5aj4y

Position Summary

This role comes under the AppSec Platform charter, focused on designing and developing a multi cloud, portable, OSS backed, streaming first data platform for powering API observability & security products. Additionally the team is also responsible for common services in the authentication & authorization space. The platform serves as the core-pillar for customer facing Analytics & consumption layer for various product modules like Catalog, Run-time Protection, Application/AI Security. You will be expected to manage and grow an engineering team of 8-10 engineers, driving execution, innovation, and delivery of high-impact platform capabilities, drive operational excellence through monitoring, reliability improvements, cost optimization of large-scale data systems and most importantly contribute to the company’s mission of becoming a global leader in the AppSec space.

About the Role

• Architect and build large-scale data platforms and microservices-based systems that process and analyze high-volume API traffic.


• Lead project execution from planning to delivery, defining scope, milestones, and deliverables in collaboration with cross-functional teams.


• Ensure engineering teams follow best practices in architecture, coding standards, testing, and security.


• Debug and resolve complex distributed system issues across streaming, storage, and service layers.


• Manage engineering priorities, allocate resources effectively, and ensure timely delivery of projects.


• Drive technical innovation, evaluating and adopting new technologies to improve platform scalability and performance.


• Define and track KPIs for engineering productivity, system performance, and reliability.


• Collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, and other engineering teams to build features aligned with customer and business needs.

About You

• 9–12 years of overall engineering experience preferably in the platform space.


• At least 2 years of engineering management experience. Proven ability to lead, mentor, and grow teams of 8+ engineers, fostering a high-performance engineering culture.


• Hands-on experience building and scaling distributed data platforms and microservices architectures.


• Strong programming experience in Java, Python, or Go.


• Operational experience with streaming and data processing technologies such as Kafka, Kafka Streams, Flink and Spark.


• Experience with modern analytical and data lake technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Apache Pinot/Druid, ClickHouse etc.


• Familiarity with relational and NoSQL databases.


• Strong understanding of observability, monitoring, and reliability practices for large-scale systems.


• Excellent communication and leadership skills, with experience working across geographically distributed teams.


• Ability to operate effectively in fast-growing startup environments with evolving requirements.

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 [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.