Director Software Engineering - AppSec Platform

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. Position Summary Join Harness at a defining moment for application security — the moment AI stopped being a feature of the attack surface and became the attack surface itself. Harness is the leading AI-native software delivery platform, helping engineering teams build, test, secure, and deploy software faster and more safely. We're backed by $600M+ in funding, led by AppDynamics founder Jyoti Bansal, and recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for DevSecOps Platforms. Our Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) team protects the APIs and applications that power some of the world's most demanding digital businesses — at a moment when API traffic, AI agent endpoints, and machine-to-machine communication are growing faster than any human security team can manually review. WAAP also owns Harness's AI Security capabilities, putting this team at the center of some of the most important emerging problems in the industry in AI era: discovering and inventorying AI usage across an enterprise, red-teaming AI systems and agents before attackers do, and building the AI firewall layer that governs how models and agents are allowed to act. We're looking for a Director of Engineering to lead WAAP's next chapter — taking a product that already protects mission-critical, API-first traffic at scale for global customers and growing its footprint into AI Discovery, AI red-teaming, and AI firewall capabilities as enterprises figure out how to secure their own AI adoption. This is a hands-on, high-impact leadership role combining product ownership, architectural depth, and direct customer partnership, reporting into AppSec engineering leadership and working closely with a team that already has strong managers and senior ICs in place across every function. About the Role As Director of Engineering for WAAP, you'll own the technical vision, roadmap, and execution for a product line defending live, high-value traffic for global customers — and help point the team toward where AI-era protection needs to go next, from AI/agent discovery to red-teaming to enforcement at the AI firewall layer. You'll split your time between technology leadership, product and roadmap ownership, and cross-functional collaboration — partnering closely with the AST and Software Supply Chain teams that make up Harness's broader AppSec portfolio. Key Responsibilities Define the AI-era WAAP vision — set strategy for runtime API protection, bot and abuse defense, an…