Senior Manager, Security Operations

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. About the Team The Security Operations Team at Harness is a small, high-leverage organization covering Cloud & Network Security, Detection Engineering (SOC), and Identity & Access Management (IAM). We measure ourselves against NIST CSF 2.0, run a continuous red-team and penetration-testing program with external partners, and work directly with customers on security architecture reviews and briefings. We design for assume-breach: layered preventive controls, strong identity as the perimeter, and fast detection and response. The Role We are looking for a Senior Manager to own and lead three connected disciplines: Cloud Security, IAM, and the Security Operations Center (Detection & Response). You will manage and grow engineers and leads across these areas, set technical direction, and be the accountable owner for how Harness secures its cloud infrastructure, controls access to it, and detects and responds to threats against it. This is a player-coach role. You are expected to go deep technically, make architecture calls, and also build the team, the operating cadence, and the metrics that show security maturity improving quarter over quarter. What You Will Do Cloud Security • Own the security architecture and posture of Harness's multi-cloud and Kubernetes-based production environments, including network segmentation, workload isolation, secrets management, and hardened baselines. • Drive secure-by-default infrastructure through policy-as-code (e.g., OPA), guardrails in CI/CD, and continuous posture management. • Partner with Platform and SRE on dedicated-tenant and customer-hosted deployment models, including the controls that make those models safe at enterprise scale. • Support the security of customer-facing runtime components such as the Harness Delegate, including token scoping, least-privilege execution, and containment of compromised components. Identity & Access Management • Own the workforce and workload identity strategy: SSO, MFA, privileged access, just-in-time access, service-account and machine-identity lifecycle, and access reviews. • Advance Zero Trust principles across internal systems and production, using a central authority model with human-in-the-loop approvals for high-risk actions. • Reduce standing privilege and credential sprawl; make least privilege measurable and auditable. Security Operations & Detection Engineering • Lead the SOC and Detection Engineering function: detection coverage, alert quality, triage, incident response, and on-call readiness. • Build detections mapped to attacker techniques (MITRE ATT&CK) and validate them through purple-team exercises and red-team findings. • Own the incident response lifecycle, from runbooks and tabletop exercises to post-incident reviews that feed back into engineering and control improvements. • Improve automation and tooling (SIEM, SOAR, EDR, cloud-native logging) to reduce mean time to detect and respond. Leadership & Program Management • Hire, coach, and develop a high-performing team; set clear expectations, growth paths, and a healthy on-call culture. • Translate NIST CSF 2.0 goals into a prioritized roadmap with clear owners, milestones, and executive-ready reporting. • Work with external red-team and penetration-testing partners to scope exercises, triage findings, and drive remediation to closure. • Support customer trust: contribute to security briefings, questionnaires, and architecture reviews, and communicate the shared responsibility model clearly and credibly. • Present security posture, risk, and progress to senior leadership, including the executive team. What We're Looking For Required • 10+ years in security engineering, cloud security, or security operations, with 3+ years managing technical security teams. • Deep hands-on experience securing AWS, GCP, and/or Azure and Kubernetes environments at scale. • Strong IAM background: SSO/federation, privileged access management, workload identity, and Zero Trust architecture. • Proven experience running or building detection and response capabilities, including incident command for significant events. • Experience with SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and cloud-native detection tooling, and with writing or reviewing detection logic. • Working knowledge of security frameworks and compliance regimes (NIST CSF, SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP or similar). • Excellent written and verbal communication; comfortable presenting to executives and to