Building the Next Phase of Harness’s AI Engineering Organization in India

Over the past year, Harness’s India organization has entered a new phase of growth – one defined not just by scale, but by increasing technical depth and impact.

What began as steady expansion has turned into real momentum across engineering, product, and operations. Today, 480 people work in India, contributing across every major product area. In 2025 alone, the team in India grew by more than 75%, and now each core Harness product offering has a strong engineering presence in the region.

As we continue expanding our AI R&D Center in Bangalore, we are scaling toward an ambitious goal: building a team of 1,000+ employees in India over the next three years.

This growth is intentional, and it reflects a broader shift in how software is built in the modern era.

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Why we’re scaling R&D in India — now

The software industry is at an inflection point.

Generative AI has dramatically accelerated how quickly code can be written. Tasks that once took days can now be completed in hours. But as development velocity increases, a more fundamental challenge has come into focus: writing code is no longer the hardest part of building software.

The real complexity begins after the code is written – in testing, security, deployment, operations, governance, and cost management across increasingly distributed systems. This “outer loop” accounts for the majority of engineering effort, and it’s where risk and operational friction tend to accumulate.

At Harness, we believe this post-code complexity is one of the defining engineering challenges of the decade. Addressing it requires unified intelligence across the entire software delivery lifecycle, as well as teams with deep experience operating at real-world scale.

That belief is what’s driving our continued investment in R&D talent in India.

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How R&D in India is evolving

Expanding our AI R&D Center in Bangalore isn’t about adding capacity for its own sake. It’s about increasing the depth of technical contribution and ownership coming from India as the platform continues to scale.

Teams in Bangalore work across AI and machine learning, platform architecture, resiliency, security intelligence, testing, and FinOps. They contribute to, and in many cases lead, the development of critical parts of the Harness platform – production systems that operate at scale and directly affect customer reliability, security, and cost.

This expanded footprint gives us more flexibility in how we build and operate the platform. It allows teams in India to take on broader technical scope over time, participate earlier in design decisions, and stay closer to how systems behave in production, while continuing to collaborate closely with teams across other regions.

And therefore, that direction shapes how we think about hiring. ‘

As we grow, we look for engineers who want to understand complex systems, who care about how software behaves beyond initial delivery, and who are motivated by increasing responsibility as the platform – and their role within it – evolves.

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How AI innovation is taking shape at Harness

Our approach to AI is shaped by the same constraints as the rest of the platform: scale, reliability, and real operational complexity. We’re not adding AI as a layer on top of existing workflows. We’re using it where it can reduce manual effort, provide useful context, and support better decisions across the entire software delivery lifecycle.

In practice, this shows up in tangible ways:

1. Agentic DevOps capabilities that generate pipelines, diagnose failures, and improve resiliency.
2. Security intelligence that prioritizes vulnerabilities and recommends practical remediation steps.
3. FinOps features that explain cost behavior and support automated governance.
4. Testing capabilities that adapt as applications and environments change.

These efforts are intentionally integrated into the platform rather than delivered as isolated features. They rely on shared context – about services, environments, and organizational structure – and on orchestration that makes AI output usable in day-to-day engineering work.

This is what we mean when we talk about automating everything after code.

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Investing in talent and the local engineering ecosystem

Sustained growth in India requires more than lateral hiring. We’re building multiple talent pipelines, including experienced engineers from diverse backgrounds, hires from institutions such as IITs and BITS, and expanded early-career and internship programs. In parallel, we’re increasing engagement with the local developer community through technical events and university partnerships to support long-term ecosystem development.

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Looking ahead

With our recent Series E funding and continued platform expansion, we’re able to invest with a long-term view – in the platform, in our teams, and in India’s growing role within the company. The teams in India are contributing across core areas of the platform and helping shape how software is tested, secured, deployed, and operated as AI becomes a larger part of the development process. The work involves real systems, real constraints, and real customer impact.

We’re still early, and there’s plenty to improve. But the direction is deliberate.

If you’re excited by meaningful ownership, hard problems, and building systems that matter at scale, we’re building that future here. Come join us.