Harness Doubles Down on India: 1,000 Engineers to Power the “AI After Code” Revolution
As AI helps developers write code at unprecedented speed, Jyoti Bansal’s Harness is betting on Indian engineering talent to solve the industry’s next great bottleneck: everything that happens after the code is written.
In a powerful affirmation of India’s ascendant role in the global technology landscape, San Francisco-based AI DevOps leader Harness is launching a massive expansion of its India operations, with plans to hire over 1,000 engineers in the coming years. This strategic move, centered on the company’s Bengaluru R&D hub, is a direct response to a seismic shift in software development: the explosion of AI-generated code. Founded by Indian-American serial entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, creator of the multi-billion dollar success AppDynamics, Harness is positioning its Indian team not as a support center but as the core engine for its next phase of AI innovation.
The “After Code” Challenge: AI’s New Bottleneck
The software industry is at an inflection point. While generative AI tools dramatically accelerate how quickly code can be written, they have inadvertently created a new, more complex problem. Bansal argues that the “real bottleneck” has now shifted to the subsequent stages of the software lifecycle: the testing, securing, deploying, and governing of applications across increasingly distributed systems. This “outer loop” of work can consume 60-70% of a developer’s time and is where operational risk accumulates.
Harness’s mission is to automate this entire “after code” phase. Their platform uses a proprietary knowledge graph that understands a customer’s unique architecture and policies, enabling AI agents to automate tasks like pipeline generation, failure diagnosis, and security remediation. The recent $240 million Series E funding round, which values Harness at $5.5 billion, provides the capital to aggressively scale this vision, with India playing a starring role.
Why India Is Central to Harness’s AI Ambitions
The decision to scale the Bengaluru hub to over 1,000 employees is a strategic, not just a tactical, hiring move. The India team has grown 75% in 2025 alone to about 480 employees and is already a pillar of the company, with Bengaluru being Harness’s largest development center outside the United States.
The table below summarizes the driving forces behind this major investment:
The Jyoti Bansal Factor: A Founder’s Belief in Homegrown Talent
The India push is deeply personal for CEO Jyoti Bansal. An IIT Delhi alumnus who founded and sold AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion, Bansal has firsthand experience of India’s engineering potential. In his announcement, he stated, “India is taking on an increasingly strategic role as a major hub for the innovations that shape Harness’s long-term platform vision”.
Bansal’s track record as a “serial entrepreneur” and his hands-on approach through his venture firm, Unusual Ventures, lend significant credibility to this expansion. His vision is to build “one of the world’s most advanced AI engineering ecosystems right here in India,” solving real-world problems for developers and DevOps teams globally.
A Blueprint for “Atmanirbhar” Tech
Harness’s move is a microcosm of a larger trend supporting India’s Atmanirbhar Bharat (Self-Reliant India) vision. It represents a shift from “brain drain” to “brain gain,” where global tech leaders establish high-value R&D centers that offer world-class opportunities to Indian engineers. This not only creates thousands of skilled jobs but also embeds India more deeply into the global value chain of cutting-edge AI and DevOps innovation
