Staff Cloud Engineer at Harness | $200K–$250K SRE in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
Compensation & Market Positioning: The $200K–$250K range is above median for Senior Cloud/SRE engineers in the US market (typical range: $160K–$220K at senior level), and competitive even for Staff-level positions. This suggests Harness is targeting top-tier talent and is willing to pay accordingly for deep expertise.
Career Development: This role sits at the Staff/Senior level — a position that develops both technical depth and leadership breadth. Key skills you'll sharpen include:
- Multi-cloud architecture (AWS, GCP, Azure) — highly portable and in demand across virtually every industry
- SRE practices (SLIs/SLOs, error budgets) — a discipline seeing rapid adoption beyond Big Tech
- Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform — the current gold standard for platform engineering
- AI-OPS — an emerging, high-growth specialization with limited supply of practitioners
Company Stage & Culture Signals: At a $5.5B valuation with $570M raised, Harness is late-stage growth — past the chaotic early startup phase but still scaling aggressively. The "16 startups within a startup" framing signals autonomy and entrepreneurial culture, but also potential for context-switching. The mentorship expectation signals a team-building, not just individual contributor, mindset.
Green Flags: Strong investor backing, high-profile customers, a product directly relevant to the role (you'd use Harness CI/CD yourself), and a clear market tailwind with AI-driven DevOps demand.
Watch For: Incident response duties in SRE roles can blur work-life boundaries — clarify on-call expectations and rotation frequency during interviews.
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
As a Staff/Senior Cloud Engineer at Harness, you will play a pivotal role in designing, building, and maintaining our cloud infrastructure. You will be responsible for ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our systems, incorporating a blend of Cloud Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices. This role requires a strong technical background, a passion for innovation, and the ability to work collaboratively in a fast-paced environment.
Key Responsibilities
Cloud Infrastructure Design & Implementation:
- Design, build, and manage scalable, secure, and reliable cloud infrastructure using GCP, AWS, or Azure.
- Develop infrastructure-as-code using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE):
- Implement SRE practices to ensure the reliability, availability, and performance of cloud services.
- Develop and maintain monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to detect and address issues proactively.
- Perform capacity planning and demand forecasting to ensure system scalability and performance.
Automation & CI/CD:
- Deploy, manage, and scale applications using Kubernetes (K8s).
- Utilize Helm for packaging, deploying, and managing applications on Kubernetes.
- Design and implement continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to automate the delivery of applications and infrastructure.
- Develop automation scripts and tools to streamline operations and improve efficiency.
Security & Compliance:
- Ensure cloud infrastructure and applications meet security and compliance standards.
- Implement security best practices and perform regular security audits and assessments.
Collaboration & Mentorship:
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams including developers, product managers, and operations to deliver high-quality solutions.
- Mentor and guide junior engineers, sharing best practices and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
About You
Technical Expertise:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- 7+ years of experience in cloud engineering, site reliability engineering, or related roles.
- Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and cloud-native services.
- Proficiency in infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform), Helm package manager, and configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet).
- Experience with AI-OPS.
SRE Practices:
- Experience with SRE principles, including error budgets, SLIs, SLOs, and incident management.
- Strong knowledge of monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, GCM).
Automation & DevOps:
- Expertise in building and managing CI/CD pipelines using tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or Harness.
- Strong coding skills (Python, Go, etc.) and familiarity with version control systems (Git).
Security & Compliance:
- Understanding of security best practices for cloud infrastructure and applications.
- Experience with compliance frameworks (ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS) is a plus.
Soft Skills:
- Excellent problem-solving skills and attention to detail.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills, with a proactive and innovative approach.
Work Location
- United States (Remote)
Pay Transparency
$200,000 – $250,000 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
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.