Director of Quality Engineering & Automation

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.

Role Overview

At Harness, we are on a mission to enable every software developer to deliver code to their users reliably, efficiently, and securely. As Director of Engineering Quality & Automation, you will own the technical strategy, systems, and culture that ensure Harness ships high-quality software at scale — through rigorous testing infrastructure, release reliability, and AI-native automation.

You will lead a large team,within a distributed engineering organization of 40–60+ engineers and engineering managers responsible for test automation, quality gates, CI/CD reliability, and intelligent automation across the software delivery lifecycle. You will build a quality-first, automation-driven engineering culture that sets the global benchmark for reliable, AI-assisted software delivery.

This is a high-impact leadership role requiring deep SaaS expertise, strong operational execution, and a passion for quality engineering, test automation, and AI-driven workflows. You will partner closely with product engineering, infrastructure, SRE, and security teams to raise the bar on engineering quality and automate away manual toil.

Key Responsibilities

1. Quality & Automation Strategy

• Define and execute the vision and roadmap for engineering quality, test automation, and release reliability.
• Establish scalable foundations for CI/CD reliability, testing infrastructure, and automated quality gates.
• Champion AI-native quality practices, integrating generative AI, intelligent automation, and agentic workflows into testing and release processes.
• Partner with product and platform engineering teams to embed quality and automation standards into every stage of the SDLC.

2. Testing Infrastructure & Release Reliability

• Own and optimize testing infrastructure and release engineering, ensuring teams can reliably ship multiple production releases per day without compromising quality.
• Build and evolve scalable, cost-effective, multi-cloud, Kubernetes-based testing infrastructure that eliminates flakiness.
• Standardize automated testing frameworks, quality gates, and deployment validation across microservices and multi-tenant SaaS environments.
• Ensure testing and release systems meet high standards for scalability, resilience, and availability.

3. Quality Metrics & Continuous Improvement

• Establish data-driven quality and reliability metrics using DORA, SPACE, and Software Engineering Insights like frameworks.
• Analyze and eliminate quality bottlenecks across CI/CD pipelines, test systems, and release workflows.
• Drive measurable improvements in change failure rate, MTTR, build reliability, test coverage, and defect escape rate.
• Build executive-level visibility into engineering quality, release health, and automation ROI.

4. AI-Native Automation

• Drive automation initiatives that eliminate repetitive manual work across testing, release validation, and quality operations.
• Pioneer AI-assisted and agentic testing practices where intelligent systems generate test cases, optimize pipelines, detect issues, and assist in remediation.
• Integrate AI-powered tooling into testing systems, quality gates, and release orchestration to improve release confidence.
• Improve reliability engineering through advanced automated testing and intelligent quality gates.

5. Leadership & Talent Management

• Lead, mentor, and grow a globally distributed quality and automation engineering organization.
• Build a high-performance, execution-oriented culture focused on ownership, rigor, and continuous improvement.
• Recruit and retain top quality engineering and automation talent, with strong collaboration across US and India teams.
• Develop leadership pipelines and clear career growth frameworks for quality and automation engineers.

Core Focus Areas

• Engineering Quality

• High availability and reliability engineering
• Scalable testing infrastructure and automation
• CI/CD excellence and release reliability
• Operational maturity and engineering governance

• Developer Experience

• Reducing developer friction and toil
• Improving onboarding and engineering workflows
• Accelerating feedback loops and development cycles
• Building intuitive, self-service developer platforms

• Infrastructure Excellence

• Cost effective Cloud-native and Kubernetes-based engineering systems for reliable testing
• Scalable multi-cloud SaaS testing infrastructure to remove flakiness
• Internal developer platform engineering and developer enablement
• AI-native productivity and automation systems

Minimum Qualifications

Experience

• 12+ years of so