Staff Performance Test Engineer

Job Description Harness is a high-growth company that is disrupting the software delivery market. Our mission is to enable the 30 million software developers in the world to deliver code to their users reliably, efficiently, securely and quickly, increasing customers pace of innovation while improving the developer experience. We offer solutions for every step of the software delivery lifecycle to build, test, secure, deploy and manage reliability, feature flags and cloud costs. The Harness Software Delivery Platform includes modules for CI, CD, Cloud Cost Management, Feature Flags, Service Reliability Management, Security Testing Orchestration, Chaos Engineering, Software Engineering Insights and continues to expand at an incredibly fast pace. Harness is led by technologist and entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, who founded AppDynamics and sold it to Cisco for $3.7B. We're backed with $425M in venture financing from top-tier VC and strategic firms, including J.P. Morgan, Capital One Ventures, Citi Ventures, ServiceNow, Splunk Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Adage Capital Partners, Balyasny Asset Management, Gaingels, Harmonic Growth Partners, Menlo Ventures, IVP, Unusual Ventures, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Alkeon Capital, Battery Ventures, Sorenson Capital, Thomvest Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. About The Role Join our team as a Staff Performance Test Engineer and shape the performance engineering landscape across Harness's entire platform. In this senior role, you'll architect and drive performance excellence across multiple product modules while establishing yourself as the go-to expert for scalability and reliability challenges. You'll partner closely with architects, Site Reliability Engineers, and development teams to influence critical design decisions and drive performance improvements from the ground up. This is an opportunity to build cutting-edge performance frameworks that will scale with our rapidly growing platform. What You'll Do Strategic Leadership & Framework Development - Champion performance testing strategy and execution across all Harness modules - Architect scalable, reusable performance testing frameworks and automated pipelines - Establish performance benchmarks in partnership with product and engineering leadership Performance Analysis & Optimization - Conduct comprehensive performance analysis using industry-standard profiling tools (JFR, JMC, Splunk,DataDog) - Execute sophisticated testing scenarios including load, stress, endurance, and spike testing for cloud-native microservices - Drive thorough root cause analysis for performance issues and collaborate on optimization solutions - Deliver clear, actionable performance insights through metrics analysis (p99, mean, median) to stakeholders Innovation & Tooling - Develop advanced tooling for realistic workload generation, test data simulation, and dynamic environment management - Create monitoring and observability solutions to track system behavior under production-scale loads - Build automation that enables teams to integrate performance testing early in the development lifecycle Team Development & Collaboration - Mentor engineering teams on performance best practices and shift-left testing approaches - Work closely with SRE and DevOps teams to optimize system performance and reliability - Foster a culture of performance awareness across cross-functional teams Core Experience What We're Looking For - 8+ years in software quality engineering with 3+ years specializing in performance engineering at a product-focused company - Expert-level proficiency with performance testing tools such as Gatling, JMeter, Locust, or k6 - Deep understanding of microservices architectures, asynchronous systems, and API technologies (REST/gRPC/GraphQL) Technical Expertise - Strong automation development skills in Java or Python with ability to build robust, maintainable test frameworks - Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker) - Proficiency across major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) - Advanced knowledge of monitoring and observability stack (Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, Datadog) - Experience integrating with CI/CD pipelines and version control systems (GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, Harness) - Strong scripting capabilities (Python, Bash) with excellent analytical and debugging skills Leadership & Communication - Proven track record of leading cross-functional initiatives and driving technical decisions - Exceptional communication skills with ability to translate complex technical concepts for diverse audiences - Experience mentoring engineers and building high-performing teams Bonus Points - Chaos engineering experience or expertise in system fault injection techniques to verify system resiliency - Active contributions to open-source performance tooling projects - Experience building and scaling SaaS multi-tenant architectures - Background in working in startup environments or working with developer-tools products Work Location - Bangalore. The successful candidate will be expected to be in the Bangalore office 3x/ week. What You Will Have At Harness - Experience building a transformative product - End-to-end ownership of your projects - Competitive salary - Comprehensive healthcare benefit - Flexible work schedule - Quarterly Harness TGIF-Off / 4 days - Paid Time Off and Parental Leave - Monthly, quarterly, and annual social and team building events - Monthly internet reimbursement Harness In The News - Harness AI Tackles Software Development's Real Bottleneck - After Vibe Coding Comes Vibe Testing (Almost) - Startup Within a Startup: Empowering Intrapreneurs for Scalable Innovation - Jyoti Bansal (Harness) - Jyoti Bansal, Harness | theCUBEd Awards - Eight years after selling AppDynamics to Cisco, Jyoti Bansal is pursuing an unusual merger - Harness snags Split.io, as it goes all in on feature flags and experiments - Exclusive: Jyoti Bansal-led Harness has raised $150 million in debt financing 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 @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 [Confidential Information]. 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.