Principal Customer Architect
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Job Location:
San Francisco, CA - USA
Monthly Salary:
Not Disclosed
Posted on:
3 hours ago
Vacancies:
1 Vacancy
Job Summary
Harness is led by technologist and entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal founder of AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco for $3.7B). The company has raised $240M in Series E venture funding is valued at $5.5B and backed by top investors including Goldman Sachs Menlo Ventures IVP Google Ventures J.P. Morgan Capital One Ventures Citi Ventures ServiceNow Splunk Ventures and more. Harness is building the industrys leading AI-powered software delivery platform enabling teams worldwide to build test and deliver software faster safer and more reliably. Writing code is only 3040% of the engineering lifecycle the rest involves testing deployments security compliance and optimization. Harness brings AI and automation to this outer loop turning complex time-consuming workflows into streamlined processes at massive global scale.
The platform includes industry leading products inCI/CD Feature Flags Cloud Cost Management Service Reliability Chaos Engineering Software Engineering Insights Internal Developer Experience and API discovery observability governance and runtime protection. Over the past year Harness powered 128M deployments 81M builds 1.2T API calls protected and $1.9B in cloud spend optimized helping customers like United Airlines and Choice Hotels accelerate releases by up to 75% and achieve 10x DevOps efficiency. With employees in over 25 countries Harness is shaping the future of AI-driven software delivery and were looking for exceptional talent to help us move even faster.
Position Summary
We are seeking a Principal Customer Architect (Forward Deployed Engineer) to join our Customer Success this role you will act as a technical expert embedded with our customers to ensure they realize maximum value from our platform. You will configure and optimize platforms for client use cases build workflows around real user needs drive product adoption and keep customer deployments healthy. As a strategic technical advisor you will enable customers through hands-on support and guidance helping them achieve their business outcomes while maintaining high satisfaction. This role reports directly to the Director Customer Architect and will collaborate closely with Customer Success Architects Product Engineering and other cross-functional teams to deliver results.
About the role
- Technical Enablement & Customer Adoption: Lead technical onboarding and enablement programs to drive high customer adoption and satisfaction. Provide best-practice guidance and hands-on support so customers fully leverage our solutions aiming to maintain over 90% product adoption in each account.
- Strategic Advisory: Serve as a trusted technical advisor to customer teams understanding their goals and challenges. Influence key stakeholders by articulating how our platform aligns with their business objectives and guide them on strategic infrastructure improvements to achieve desired outcomes.
- Business Value Reviews (BVRs): Plan and deliver regular Business Value Reviews to demonstrate progress toward customers goals product usage and realized value. Prepare compelling presentations (using Google Slides and other tools) to highlight ROI technical achievements and next-step recommendations.
- Churn Analysis & Customer Success: Proactively monitor customer health and usage metrics. Perform churn analysis to identify at-risk accounts and technical pain points. Work with customers to resolve issues optimize their implementations and ensure technical success thereby maintaining an Annual Gross Retention Rate (AGRR) above 90%.
- Infrastructure as Code Management (IaCM): Deliver hands-on support in the Infrastructure-as-Code module. Help customers implement and manage IaC solutions to automate their cloud infrastructure on platforms like AWS and GCP.
- Internal Developer Platforms (IDP): Guide customers in building and improving Internal Developer Platforms on Kubernetes. Assist with setting up CI/CD pipelines container orchestration and developer self-service workflows.
- Emerging Technology Enablement: Contribute your expertise to new domains such as Software Engineering Intelligence (SEI) Cloud Cost Management (CCM) and Customer Engineering (CE). Help customers adopt these emerging solutions by providing architectural guidance and hands-on assistance.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Act as the voice of the customer internally. Work with Product and Engineering teams to translate feedback into improvements influence roadmaps and troubleshoot complex issues. Partner with Customer Success Managers and Sales to strategize on account plans renewals and expansion.
We are looking for candidates with a strong technical foundation in modern DevOps practices and tools particularly in areas related to Infrastructure as Code and Internal Developer Platforms.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Hands-on experience with Terraform for managing cloud infrastructure
- Design and reuse of IaC modules across environments
- Proficiency with AWS and GCP including networking compute IAM and security
- Familiarity with Terragrunt CDK Cloud Formation or similar IaC automation frameworks
- Familiarity with Ansible or similar configuration management frameworks
Internal Developer Platforms (IDP)
- Deep understanding of Kubernetes (EKS GKE or self-managed clusters)
- Experience with Helm Kustomize and other K8s tools
- Workflow orchestrations using CI/CD tools
- Knowledge of developer self-service workflows and platform engineering principles
Automation
- Proficiency in Python Bash or Go for scripting and automation
- Experience setting up comprehensive logging alerting and performance dashboards
Security & Governance
- Understanding of security best practices for infrastructure and DevOps tooling
- Exposure to tools like OPA/Gatekeeper HashiCorp Vault or equivalent
Soft Skills
- Strong customer empathy and consultative mindset
- Ability to explain complex technical architectures to a non-technical audience
- Excellent collaboration and documentation habits
About you
- Senior-level experience (typically 5 years) in DevOps SRE or related engineering roles
- Strong communication and presentation skills with the ability to influence stakeholders
- Experience in customer-facing technical roles (e.g. Solutions Architect CSE Professional Services) is a plus
- Bachelors degree in Computer Science Engineering or a related field (or equivalent experience)
- Relevant certifications (e.g. AWS GCP Kubernetes Terraform) are advantageous
- Success in this role will be measured by high customer adoption AGRR above 90% and the quality of enablement and strategic guidance delivered.
Work Location
Remote - U.S.
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
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 @. 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. You can also find additional information about this type of scam and report any fraudulent employment offers via the Federal Trade Commissions website ( or you can contact your local law enforcement agency.
Required Experience:
Staff IC
Key Skills
- Kubernetes
- S3
- Google Cloud Platform
- Cassandra
- System Architecture
- Redshift
- AWS
- Cloud Architecture
- NoSQL
- UML
- Kafka
- Distributed Systems
About Company
Enhance DevOps with AI-driven CI/CD, feature flags, chaos engineering, and cloud cost management to secure & streamline software delivery.
