Sep 16, 2025

Sanjay Nagaraj, SVPof Engineering Harness is the AI DevOps platform company, designed to help enterprises address inefficiencies that slow modern software development. Built from the ground up to support the full software delivery lifecycle, including testing, deployment, verification, cost control, and security, Harness enables organizations to move faster, reduce risk, and scale with confidence. Its purpose-built architecture and AI-first capabilities offer a modern, integrated alternative to the fragmented, legacy toolchains still used by many enterprises. Harness delivers measurable results for its enterprise customers while empowering the engineers who build and use it. The platform is built by engineers for engineers, fostering a culture rooted in empathy, efficiency, and technical excellence. “We are our first customers. Before anything reaches the outside world, it's been tested and refined internally,” says Sanjay Nagaraj, SVP of Engineering at Harness. This “customer-zero” approach reinforces the company's belief that developers should shape the tools they use to ship their code. From day one, every product is designed with the end-users in mind, ensuring that customer needs drive engineering decisions at every stage. India As A Global Innovation Hub Harness has aligned its engineering philosophy with a broader investment strategy. Since 2018, the company has significantly expanded its presence in India, particularly in Bangalore, where end-to-end product development teams drive some of the platform's most critical innovations. These India-based teams, comprising engineers, product managers, designers, and customer success specialists, take ownership of products from concept to production. Several major components of the platform, including AI-driven modules, originated from these teams. Harness's investment in India is about scaling operations and tapping into world-class talent to shape the future of enterprise software delivery for customers across North America, Asia, and beyond. Engineers at the company also gain first-hand experience in building a business from the ground up by identifying product-market fit, delivering sustained value, and scaling revenue to a billion-dollar enterprise while maintaining quality and innovation. Automating and Accelerating Software Delivery As AI-driven development becomes the norm, legacy delivery tools, built before the rise of AI, can no longer keep pace with modern demands for speed, quality, and compliance. Harness addresses this need as a unified, intelligent delivery platform that automates every critical step after the code is written. Central to this approach are Harness's “golden pipelines,” which are standardized and repeatable delivery workflows that embed security, compliance, and quality checks from the start. These pipelines allow organizations to move from manual, error-prone processes to automated, policy-driven deployments. For example, a major financial services firm that once relied on a 200-page manual for compliance and security reduced its code-to-production time from months to minutes by implementing these golden pipelines. Harness's AI-native capabilities include AI test automation, context-aware CI/CD pipelines, continuous verification, intelligent policy enforcement, and patented cloud cost management with intelligent orchestration and cloud autostopping. These features enable organizations to integrate automated policy checks, detect anomalies in real-time, and reduce infrastructure costs without compromising uptime or performance. We are our first customers. Before anything reaches the outside world, it's been tested and refined internally The platform's impact is evident in large-scale deployments. A global airline reduced pipeline creation time from 10 days to seconds, decreased build durations from over 20 minutes to fewer than five minutes, and shortened new application onboarding from four weeks to just a few hours. These improvements supported the airline's larger objectives, enhancing operational efficiency, service capacity, customer experience, and cost control. Beyond its technical strengths, Harness fosters a “startup within a startup” culture, encouraging teams to identify customer pain points and develop solutions. Many of the platform's most successful features began as grassroots initiatives led by engineers working directly with users. Looking ahead, Harness is deepening its AI capabilities and strengthening its position as a foundational layer for AI-native development. As more organizations adopt AI-generated code and cloud-native architectures, Harness is positioned to deliver the automation, governance, and scalability essential for sustainable innovation, helping define what modern software delivery should look like in the age of AI.