Staff Software Engineer - Data Collection

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

Harness is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our Agent and Data Collection team. This team forms the foundation of the Appsec platform, building high-performance systems that extract API data from diverse environments using eBPF, traffic mirroring, API gateway policies, and language agents. You will solve challenging systems and networking problems, designing resilient solutions that power Traceable’s API security platform at scale. This role is ideal for an engineer who thrives on deep technical work, system fundamentals, and building critical infrastructure that has direct product impact. Interested? We’d love to hear from you.

About the role

• Design and build advanced data collection agents and pipelines in Go, C++, and Java.
• Develop scalable mechanisms for extracting API traffic across cloud-native, on-prem, and hybrid environments.
• Work across the stack: Linux internals, networking protocols (TCP, UDP, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, gRPC, TLS), and system performance.
• Contribute to policies for API Gateways and load balancers (F5, Citrix ADC, Avi, Arista).
• Optimize for performance, reliability, and low-overhead data collection at scale.
• Partner with Security Research and Platform teams to deliver secure, production-grade solutions.
• Contribute to open-source projects where relevant and represent