Customer Engineer

Overview

You work with Harness customers - typically platform engineering and DevOps teams at mid-to-large companies - to help them successfully implement and optimize Harness's suite of DevOps tools (CI/CD, cloud cost management, feature flags, security testing, etc.). You're not doing basic support tickets. You're building SQL queries in BigQuery to surface usage insights, troubleshooting complex pipeline configurations, consulting on architecture decisions, and doing hands-on engineering work to solve technical problems. You split time between scheduled customer calls, async technical work, and internal collaboration with product/engineering.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Late-stage venture-backed (Series D equivalent based on 1,600 employee count)

Size: 1,632 employees

Growth: Active hiring across engineering and customer-facing roles

Market Position: Established player in DevOps/CI-CD space competing against GitLab, CircleCI, Jenkins, Spinnaker, and cloud-native tools from AWS/GCP/Azure. Differentiator is AI-driven automation and unified platform approach (they have 14+ different modules from CI/CD to cloud cost to security).

The Customer Base

Who Uses Harness:

• Mid-market to enterprise companies (based on product complexity and 100+ integrations)
• Platform engineering teams, DevOps engineers, SREs
• Companies with significant cloud spend and complex deployment needs
• E-commerce, SaaS companies, financial services (mentioned on website)

Technical Environment:

• Multi-cloud deployments (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Kubernetes/container-heavy infrastructure
• Complex CI/CD pipelines with compliance requirements
• Teams using 10+ different tools in their DevOps stack

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Customer Calls/Meetings (30%) | Technical Work (40%) | Internal Collaboration (20%) | Documentation/Admin (10%)

Key Activities

• SQL/BigQuery Analysis: You write SQL queries against customer usage data in BigQuery to surface insights - pipeline performance, cost trends, adoption metrics, failure patterns. You create dashboards and reports customers can use to optimize their setup. This is a core part of the role (hence why it's in the requirements).

• Technical Troubleshooting: Customers hit issues with pipeline configurations, integrations breaking, performance problems, or features not working as expected. You debug these - reading logs, examining configurations, reproducing issues, sometimes writing code to patch problems or build workarounds.

• Implementation Consulting: You join calls with customer platform teams to discuss architecture decisions - how to structure their pipelines, which Harness features to use for their use case, how to migrate from their existing CI/CD tool, governance and RBAC setup. You're providing technical guidance, not just answering questions.

• Customer Education: You run technical sessions teaching customers about new features, best practices, or advanced use cases. Sometimes this is formal training, sometimes it's walking them through something on a screen share.

• Internal Collaboration: You relay customer feedback to product teams, join internal technical reviews, help sales engineers with pre-sales technical questions for your accounts, and coordinate with support when issues escalate.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Broad Technical Surface Area: Harness has 14+ different product modules (CI, CD, cloud cost, feature flags, security testing, chaos engineering, etc.). Customers use different combinations. You need to know enough about all of them to be useful, which means constant learning.

• Complex Customer Environments: Enterprise DevOps setups are messy. Customers have legacy systems, custom scripts, one-off integrations, and technical debt. You'll spend time navigating their complexity, not just configuring Harness in a clean environment.

• Customer Frustration: When things break in CI/CD pipelines, it blocks deployments. Customers are stressed. You get pulled into urgent firefighting situations where you're under pressure to fix things quickly.

• Ambiguous Problems: Many issues don't have clean answers. Is it a Harness bug? Customer misconfiguration? An integration problem with a third-party tool? You have to investigate and figure it out, often with incomplete information.

What Success Looks Like

• Customers actively use Harness features and expand into additional modules (CI → CD → cloud cost, etc.)
• You resolve technical blockers quickly enough that customers don't churn or escalate to leadership
• Customer platform teams see you as a trusted technical advisor, not just a support person
• You identify product gaps or bugs that get prioritized by engineering based on your feedback

Who You're Working With

Primary Contacts:

• DevOps Engineers / Platform Engineers (day-to-day users)
• Engineering Managers / Directors of Platform Engineering (decision-makers)
• SREs and Infrastructure teams
• Occasionally: VPs of Engineering, CTOs (for strategic accounts)

What They Care About:

• Deployment velocity - can they ship code faster and more safely with Harness?
• Reliability - will this break their pipelines or introduce new failure points?
• Cloud cost - can they reduce AWS/GCP/Azure spend?
• Developer experience - will their engineers actually use this?
• ROI - can they justify the Harness contract cost vs. open-source alternatives?

Requirements

• Strong DevOps background - you've worked with CI/CD tools, cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), Kubernetes, IaC tools like Terraform
• Automation experience - scripting (Python, Bash, Go), building pipelines, infrastructure automation
• SQL proficiency - writing complex queries, data analysis, working with BigQuery specifically
• Software development understanding - not a developer role, but you need to understand how software is built, tested, and deployed
• Customer-facing experience - you can explain technical concepts clearly, run meetings, and manage customer relationships
• Senior-level experience - they explicitly don't want junior candidates, expecting 5+ years in DevOps/platform engineering
• Time zone requirement - EST or CST only (rules out West Coast)