Forward Deployed Engineer (Implementation Engineering)

Split Software; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 170,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Healthcare benefits

FSA

Flexible work schedule

EAP

Parental leave

Team events

Internet reimbursement

Job summary

Harness is seeking Forward Deployed Engineers to embed with enterprise engineering teams and design AI-native automation on the Harness platform. You will write production code, build pipelines, and connect Harness AI Agents into a customer’s existing systems, staying engaged until capability is live in production.

You will work directly with customer engineers, delivering working software rather than documents, and travel up to 50% as needed during builds.

Qualifications

• Hands-on platform or software engineering background with coding, scripting, and integration into customer codebases.
• Experience building integrations against APIs, event-driven systems, or LLM/agent orchestration frameworks.
• Prior forward-deployed or embedded consulting background focused on working software over documents.
• Strong CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code, with depth in security, observability, or cost management.

Responsibilities

• Embed inside a customer's engineering organization for the length of a build engagement to design and build agent-driven automation.
• Write production code connecting Harness AI Agents to pipelines, repositories, ITSM tooling, security systems, and infrastructure.
• Partner directly with customer engineering stakeholders and the broader Harness delivery team to translate an approved plan into working software.
• Prototype quickly, ship incrementally, and iterate directly with customer engineers rather than handing off a static design document.
• Turn what you build into reusable patterns and share them with the broader Harness delivery organization.
• Bring direct feedback to Harness product and engineering teams based on what you learn building in real customer environments.
• Support the transition from custom build to steady-state operation so the customer can independently operate and extend what you built.
• What Success Looks Like: A working production agent integration lives in the customer's environment by end of engagement. A reusable pattern or template captured in the Solutions Factory. Customer engineers can operate and extend the integration without ongoing involvement.

Skills

Platform engineering

CI/CD

Scripting/automation

Tools

APIs integration

LLM orchestration

Agent frameworks

Job description

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

Forward Deployed Engineers work embedded inside enterprise engineering teams to design and build AI-native automation on the Harness platform. This is a hands‑on, code‑first role. You will write production code and scripts, build production pipelines, and connect Harness AI Agents into a customer's existing systems, staying engaged until the capability is live in production. You will work directly alongside customer engineers, turning business objectives into working software rather than documentation or advice.

About the role

• Embed inside a customer's engineering organization for the length of a build engagement to design and build agent‑driven automation across the software delivery lifecycle.
• Write production code connecting Harness AI Agents to a customer's pipelines, repositories, ITSM tooling, security systems, and infrastructure.
• Partner directly with customer engineering stakeholders and the broader Harness delivery team to translate an approved plan into working software.
• Prototype quickly, ship incrementally, and iterate directly with customer engineers rather than handing off a static design document.
• Turn what you build into reusable patterns and share them with the broader Harness delivery organization.
• Bring direct feedback to Harness product and engineering teams based on what you learn building in real customer environments.
• Support the transition from custom build to steady‑state operation so the customer can independently operate and extend what you built.
• What Success Looks Like:
  • A working, production agent integration lives in the customer's environment by the end of the engagement.
  • A reusable pattern or template captured in the Solutions Factory as a direct result of the build.
  • Customer engineering stakeholders are able to operate and extend the integration without an ongoing Forward Deployed Engineer presence.
  • Healthy, ongoing customer adoption of the Harness platform and AI Agents beyond the specific build, achieved by working closely with the customer throughout the engagement rather than handing off at go‑live.

About you

• A platform engineering or software engineering background, with hands‑on coding, scripting, and integration ability, not configuration‑only experience. You are comfortable working directly in a customer's codebase, infrastructure workflows, and CI/CD frameworks.
• Experience building integrations against APIs, event‑driven systems, or LLM and agent orchestration frameworks.
• Prior experience in a forward‑deployed, solutions engineering, architecture, or embedded consulting capacity where success was measured by working software, not documentation or advisory output.
• Strong grounding in CI/CD and infrastructure‑as‑code, plus depth in at least one adjacent domain, such as security, observability, or cost management, sufficient to reason about where an agent should plug into a customer's software delivery lifecycle.
• Comfortable operating with ambiguity: able to work from a business objective and an agent's capability boundary to a working integration without a pre‑written specification.
• Excellent stakeholder communication, able to work day to day with customer engineers while keeping internal stakeholders aligned on progress.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites for the duration of an active build

Work Location

• Remote with frequent travel (Up to 50%)

What you will have at Harness

• Competitive salary
• Comprehensive healthcare benefits
• Flexible Spending Account (FSA)
• Flexible work schedule
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Flexible Time Off and Parental Leave
• Monthly, quarterly, and annual social and team building events
• Monthly internet reimbursement

Pay transparency

$170,000 — $200,000 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.

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Note on Fraudulent Recruiting/Offers

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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 [e-mail]. 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.