In a move that sets it apart from the typical Global Capability Centre playbook, Harness has made India central to its product vision rather than a cost-efficient extension. With nearly 80% of its 600 engineers based in India, the DevOps and software delivery platform is positioning its India R&D hub as the command layer for everything that happens after code is written. Backed by $240 million raised in Series E funding last year, the company is doubling down on AI-led software delivery, with India at the core of that strategy.
Prashant Verma, head of R&D India at Harness, who earlier scaled engineering teams at LinkedIn, Flipkart and Traveloka, said the intent was clear from the beginning. “Day one, India was never an afterthought,” he said. “The belief was that the talent exists here to build world-class products.” Instead of following a traditional GCC model, Harness built a “startup within a startup” structure. Small teams of 4 to 8 engineers own individual product modules, work closely with customers, test ideas quickly and scale what works. Alongside mature offerings, seed-stage bets are also being built from India.
The company’s focus lies in what it calls the “outer loop” of software development, the 60% of the lifecycle that starts after code is written. While AI coding tools are speeding up development, Verma said testing, security, cost governance, deployment and incident response remain major bottlenecks. “That is where most of the delay still happens,” he said. Harness is embedding AI across this layer, using telemetry and workflow data from over 1,000 enterprise customers to automate decisions across pipelines. Among products emerging from India is AI SRE, which reduces incident resolution time by analysing signals across the lifecycle and suggesting root causes. “In a crisis, hundreds of engineers may join a call,” Verma said. “If we can reduce the time to mitigation by even 40 to 60%, the business impact is huge.” The company is also advancing its chaos engineering-based resiliency testing platform to stress-test live systems.
As hiring intensifies, 35% to 40% of Harness’s annual recruitment now comes from top engineering campuses, focusing on adaptable, “learn-fast” talent. “The era of single-skill engineers is fading,” Verma said. With AI agents expected to increasingly write and operate software, Harness is building governance, security and testing guardrails for a future where “countless agents” push code into production. “Everything after code must become intelligent, autonomous and tightly governed,” he added.
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