Engineering Manager - AST

The Opportunity

We are looking for a hands-on technical Engineering manager to take responsibility for the Application Security team in AppSec org of the Harness product portfolio. This position has strong growth potential limited only by the candidate's ability.  

Harness SaaS service consists of several microservices deploying multiple releases a week. The successful candidate will lead and manage a talented team of backend engineers in a fast-paced environment, and we are looking for candidates with strong people management skills with a passion for technology who can be seen as a role model to the team.

Key Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with product management, UX/design, and go-to-market teams to define requirements and prioritize features. Translate business needs into technical solutions and ensure alignment across departments.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities, especially in complex technical environments. Capable of making informed, high-impact decisions about architecture and design, and adept at prioritizing tasks for maximum business impact. 
• Drive definition, development, and deployment of comprehensive automated testing strategies including functional, system, performance, stress, security, load, reliability, and longevity tests
• Be data-driven: identify, generate, and provide quality metrics to substantiate quality improvements

Technical Excellence

• Strong Software Engineering Background: 8+ years of software development experience with a proven track record. Hands-on proficiency in Java is a must. Expertise in Python is a big plus. 
• Distributed Systems & Cloud Expertise: Deep understanding of distributed systems and cloud-native architectures. Experience building and operating scalable microservices in production (preferably on AWS and/or Azure). Familiarity with observability platforms and practices (logging, monitoring, tracing) is essential.
• Implement state-of-the-art quality engineering methodologies to uncover potential bottlenecks in performance, defects, risks, and user experience
• Work with stakeholders to diagnose, debug, and perform root cause analysis for issues in production and test environments
• Establish and maintain processes to meet standards compliance such as SOC2/FedRamp

Team Leadership

• Proven ability to lead and grow an engineering team. Experience hiring engineers, mentoring developers, and fostering a collaborative, high-performance team culture. Strong leadership and communication skills to coordinate across departments.
• Recruit, challenge, and reward high-performance individuals to build a high-performing organization
• Coach and mentor team members, fostering a positive culture that embraces change and drives simple solutions to complex problems
• Be a trusted partner for senior management, helping drive alignment and implementing decisions throughout your team

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Build relationships with Product Management, DevOps, SRE, Service, and Customer success teams
• Collaborate with customers and Customer Success teams to identify and resolve product issues, close testing gaps, and enhance usability
• Ensure alignment across functions and effective communication of relevant information
• Foster a culture of positive collaboration, safety to learn from failure, and continuous improvement
• Proactively provide solutions rather than just identifying problems

Qualifications

Required Experience

• Minimum 8+ years of experience in Software development.
• Minimum 3+ years as an engineering manager in a fast-paced environment.
• BS degree in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science or related field or equivalent
• Experience with automation framework design, continuous integration, and continuous deployment best practices
• Experience with REST/gRPC/gQL API-based products and services .
• Knowledge of Atlassian tools, Git, Harness, or similar tools
• Experience with Kafka, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker. 
• Thorough understanding of different testing types at scale in distributed microservice architectures

Soft Skills

• Outstanding interpersonal and communication skills
• Self-starter with exceptional attention to detail
• Customer focus, sense of urgency, and accountability
• Ability to manage diverse teams and collaborate with geographically distributed teams
• Keen business acumen, ability to influence without authority
• Willingness to ask questions and challenge the status quo

Nice to Have

• Spearheaded the adoption of shift-left test practices
• Cloud IaaS knowledge, especially in AWS/GCP
• Experience managing quality for enterprise customers
• Familiarity with KubeMonkey and other Chaos testing tools
• Exposure to code coverage, DAST/SAST tools.