Harness Engineer

IT STARTS HERE

Santander (www.santander.com) is evolving from a global, high-impact brand into a technology-driven organization, and our people are at the heart of this journey. Together, we are driving a customer-centric transformation that values bold thinking, innovation, and the courage to challenge what’s possible.

This is more than a strategic shift. It’s a chance for driven professionals to grow, learn, and make a real difference.

Our mission is to contribute to help more people and businesses prosper. We embrace a strong risk culture and all our professionals at all levels are expected to take a proactive and responsible approach toward risk management.

Our Chief Data & Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAIO) division is building a world-class AI & Data team to make a difference in the lives of over 170 million people worldwide, through one of the largest banks in the world.

We are undergoing one of the biggest transformations in our history and technology is at the heart of our strategy. Join our team to play a part in one of the most important technological projects for the financial sector in the world.

Our mission is to contribute to helping more people and businesses prosper. We embrace a strong risk culture and all our professionals at all levels are expected to take a proactive and responsible approach toward risk management. 

THE DIFFERENCE YOU MAKE

CDAIO / AI TECH is looking for a Harness Engineering to design and deliver the secure, observable, and production-grade harness that enables coding agents across the Knowledge Base Platform and related solutions.

You will define how agents connect to repositories, developer tools, CI/CD pipelines, enterprise systems, and platform knowledge, accelerating delivery while preserving security, quality, auditability, and human accountability.

• Define the architecture and delivery of the coding agent harness across engineering teams, repositories, and platform layers.

• Define safe agent workflows, roles, execution modes, approval points, escalation paths, and human-in-the-loop controls.

• Integrate agents with Git workflows, IDEs, issue trackers, documentation, CI/CD, test suites, observability, cloud environments, and internal developer platforms.

• Design MCP-based and API-based tool integrations with scoped permissions, audit trails, and governed access.

• Embed agents into delivery workflows for coding, testing, refactoring, documentation, dependency upgrades, build analysis, and deployment preparation.

• Establish secure SDLC guardrails covering source code, secrets, infrastructure, data, prompt injection, tool misuse, and protected resources.

• Define evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, regression suites, quality gates, and productivity metrics for agent-assisted engineering.

• Enable AWS cloud-native engineering and ensure agent-generated changes meet security, resilience, observability, cost, and operational standards.

• Mentor engineering teams and create reusable patterns, playbooks, reference architectures, and adoption standards.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

Our people are our greatest strength. We value diverse perspectives and empower individuals to make an impact.

Professional Experience

• 8+ years in software, platform, DevOps, cloud, AI engineering, developer platforms, or engineering productivity. (Required)
• Proven technical leadership delivering developer platforms, CI/CD automation, internal engineering tools, or AI-assisted engineering workflows. (Required)
• Hands-on experience with coding agents, LLM-based development tools, agent orchestration, and human-in-the-loop workflows. (Required)
• Experience integrating source control, CI/CD, issue tracking, documentation, observability, cloud environments, and developer portals. (Required)
• Experience in banking, financial services, or another regulated enterprise environment. (Preferred)

Education

• BSc or MSc in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. (Required)

Languages

• Spanish proficiency. (Required)
• High level of English. (Preferred)

Hard Skills

• Strong knowledge of coding agents, orchestration, task decomposition, tool use, retrieval grounding, context management, and safety guardrails. (Required)
• Strong Git, pull request, code review, branch protection, repository permission, and release workflow experience. (Required)
• Hands-on Python skills for automation, backend services, validation, and agent tooling. (Required)
• Strong CI/CD, automated testing, quality gates, DevSecOps, deployment governance, rollback, and traceability experience. (Required)
• Experience designing APIs, MCP or comparable agent-tool integrations, scoped authorization, and audit logging. (Required)
• Strong AWS, containers, infrastructure-as-code, observability, security, resilience, and cost-management knowledge. (Required)
• Knowledge of secure SDLC, responsible AI, prompt-injection defenses, data protection, policy-as-code, and compliance controls. (Required)
• Experience with Harness Engineering, internal developer platforms, agent evaluation, or enterprise coding assistants. (Preferred)

Soft Skills

• Strong technical leadership, ownership, mentoring, and ability to create standards in ambiguous environments.
• Developer empathy and practical judgment balancing delivery speed, automation, quality, security, governance, and accountability.
• Clear communication and effective collaboration across Engineering, Product, Architecture, Security, IAM, Risk, Compliance, and leadership.

WE VALUE YOUR IMPACT

Your contribution matters, and it’s recognized. You can expect a fair, competitive reward package that reflects the impact you create and the value you deliver. But we know rewards go beyond numbers.

• We’re enable our teams to go beyond through global opportunities and broad career paths.
• Flexibility that works. Enjoy a hybrid working models—some days remote, some days onsite with your team—along with flexible hours.
• Learning for life. Access hundreds of courses on our platforms, including exclusive access to our global learning space: Santander Open Academy (www.santanderopenacademy.com)
• Competitive rewards. Receive a highly competitive salary with performance-based bonuses, motivating you to keep growing with us.
• Financial advantages. Benefit from preferential banking terms, special interest rates on loans, life insurance, and more.
• Your health is our priority. Through BeHealthy, our global wellness programme, we promote Holistic wellbeing.
• We know family is everything. That’s why we offer childcare support and family-friendly programmes tailored to each life stage.
• Always by your side. Get access to Santander Contigo, our program for employees and their families offering legal, emotional, and administrative advisory services.
• Extra benefits. Gym/WellHub membership, medical centers in some of our facilities, meal subsidy, parking, shuttle service from various points in Madrid, as well as exclusive discounts and offers for Santander employees. And that’s only the beginning—we’ll tell you more when you join!

We’re here to keep you motivated, help you reach your goals, and celebrate your progress, every step of the way.

We make recruiting decisions based on your experience and skills. We value your passion to discover, invent, simplify, and build.

The personal data you provide as well as any data generated during the selection process are confidential and will be processed by Open Digital Services, S.L. with registered office at Plaza de Santa Bárbara 2, 28004 (Madrid), Madrid, Spain for the sole purpose of managing your participation in the selection processes and, where appropriate, to formalise your recruitment.  

For further information about your rights and data protection, please read the Open Digital Services Privacy Policy applicable to this type of data processing.

LOCAL COMPLIANCE

Santander is proud of being an organization where there are equal opportunities regardless of age, gender, disability, civil status, race, religion or sexual orientation. We are committed to providing an inclusive and accessible application process for all candidates.

WHAT TO DO NEXT

If this sounds like a role you are interested in, then please apply.

READY TO TAKE THE NEXT STEP IN YOUR JOURNEY?