Senior Software Engineer - Customer Engineering

How We Work: AI-First by Design

Harmonic exists to help enterprises adopt AI safely and  hold ourselves to that same standard. Everyone here actively leverages AI tools to perform their best work — from deep research and writing to building robust processes and automating complex workflows. We expect every new hire to bring a genuine curiosity for AI and a commitment to using it to work smarter, faster, and with greater creativity.

For some, this involves tinkering and remaining open to emerging tools; for others, it means architecting entirely new systems with AI at the core. We will be transparent about expectations for every role and provide the tools and support needed for you to thrive.

Customer Engineering is a brand-new function at Harmonic, and you'll be one of the first people to build it. This is a deliberate philosophy, not just a new team name: we're treating customer experience as an engineering problem. Every repeated question or manual fix is a signal that something should be automated, instrumented, or resolved at the root, not answered by hand.

The mission is simple to state and hard to do well: give customers fast, accurate answers, and use engineering to make the next hundred questions faster to answer than the last one. That means real backend work - fixing bugs, shipping small customer-driven improvements, and building automation and tooling that reduces how much of this has to be done by hand 'll have direct influence over how this function is run, tooled, and measured from day one.

We're looking for a Backend Engineer to sit inside Customer Engineering rather than the product roadmap team. You'll be the technical backbone for how we support and delight customers day-to-day: triaging and fixing bugs, resolving smallish customer requests, spotting opportunities to get ahead of a problem or surprise a customer with something they didn't ask for, and — critically — building tools and automation that let customers (and the team around you) get answers without needing an engineer in the loop every time.

You'll work across our core applications, identity providers, and data security platforms, and you'll bring the same engineering rigor to this function as you would to product work — just pointed at a different problem.

• Triage, diagnose, and fix customer-reported bugs across our backend services
• Deliver smallish customer-driven requests and improvements, keeping a lightweight roadmap of your own
• Build tooling and automation that let customers and internal teams self-serve answers, cutting down repeat questions that would otherwise need an engineer
• Dig into microservices, event-driven pipelines, and integrations with identity providers and data security platforms to find and resolve root causes, not just symptoms
• Work directly with customers and internal stakeholders to understand what's actually blocking them, then decide whether the right fix is a patch, a tool, or a process change
• Instrument and monitor the systems customers depend on so recurring issues get surfaced and fixed before they pile up — and so you can spot chances to reach out or ship something before a customer even raises it
• Look for moments to delight, not just resolve: a workflow that could be smoother, a report that could be automatic, a question that could be answered before it's asked
• Track how much of the customer experience is still manual, and systematically drive that down through automation and fixes
• Help define what "good" looks like for this function — process, tooling, and metrics — since you're building it from scratch

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend services and distributed systems in the Java ecosystem (Java, Spring Boot, Maven)
• Strong understanding of event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing patterns, messaging systems, and distributed system design
• Proven experience designing and maintaining RESTful APIs, web hooks, and service-to-service integrations
• Comfortable operating in AWS, GCP, or Azure environments and working with modern observability tooling, logging, and monitoring platforms
• A track record…