About
Nick Durkin is Field CTO for Harness, the first Software Delivery Platform to use AI to…
Activity
6K followers
-
Nick Durkin reposted thisNick Durkin reposted this'Twas the night before {unscripted}, and all through your feed, were agents and engineers and security at speed. Can we trust what we’re shipping? How fast can we go? Tomorrow, we’re getting into what teams need to know. A little behind the scenes today. The full conversation tomorrow. 👀 Join us for {unscripted} Virtual: https://bit.ly/4uQqAgQ
-
Nick Durkin reposted thisNick Durkin reposted thisUnscripted 2026, Harness’ AI software delivery conference, kicks off this Thursday in San Francisco. This year feels particularly important because software development is going through a fundamental shift. AI is making it much easier to write code, but that’s moving the bottleneck downstream. The challenge now is giving AI the right enterprise context and safely reviewing, testing, securing, and shipping everything it creates. Put simply: AI needs a safety harness. We’ve been building Harness around many of these challenges for years — long before “harness” became an AI term. Over the next three weeks, we’ll take Unscripted to nine cities, bringing together technology and engineering leaders to talk about how AI is changing the way we build and deliver software. We’re starting in San Francisco with a great group of speakers, including Rashmi Kumar from Medtronic, Sachin Malhotra from Anthropic, and Stephen Ellis from Cloudera. I’m looking forward to the conversations, ideas, and announcements we’ll share over the next few weeks. If you haven’t registered yet, you can join us here: https://lnkd.in/gAmHHqn
-
Nick Durkin shared thisBetter late than never. I want to properly welcome two people who've already made a real impact at Harness since joining this summer - Stephen Cihak and Keith Mann. Stephen Cihak joined as our EMEA Field CTO. He brings nearly 30 years across software engineering, architecture, cloud, platform engineering, DevOps, and site reliability, most recently leading Cloud Platform Engineering at Choice Hotels. A lot of you already know Stephen, he was a longtime Harness CAB member and a great partner to our team long before he joined it. As we keep expanding across EMEA, his experience running large-scale platform and AI initiatives has already been a huge asset. He's been deep in conversations with customers across the region, helping them work through platform, DevOps, and AI adoption challenges. Keith Mann also joined us this summer, taking on a dual role as Field CTO and Head of Research. He's bringing ten years as a Gartner analyst, where he led the DevSecOps Magic Quadrant, plus 25 years before that as an architect and software engineer. That combination of deep technical grounding and industry-wide perspective is a rare one, and Keith has already put it to work across our team. He's also authored a report going live tomorrow, keep an eye out. Welcome to Harness, Stephen and Keith. We're so glad to have you both on the team! P.S. They'll both be on the road for Unscripted, so make sure to look out for them and say hey!
-
Nick Durkin reposted thisNick Durkin reposted this2am. Something breaks. The old question was "what changed?" The new one is "did a human even make that change?" Tomorrow, Stephen Cihak and Keith Mann, Field CTOs at Harness, are getting into exactly that: what happens to your incident playbook once agents are shipping alongside your team. ➡️ Why accountability can't be autonomous, even when the agent found the fix ➡️ Why "what changed" is a harder question than it used to be ➡️ What has to shift in testing and observability before agents ship on their own ✨ Last call to grab a seat tomorrow, Aug 19 at 9am PT. Register to attend: https://lnkd.in/grCcXWKMWhose Incident Is This? Operating Day 2 When Agents Ship the ChangeWhose Incident Is This? Operating Day 2 When Agents Ship the Change
-
Nick Durkin shared thisPhenomenal team to joinNick Durkin shared thisIm hiring.... Folks - as we mobilise our Practice that serves over 9500 engineers across Westpac, I'm building a small Practice leadership team to help understand what this amazing community needs, wants and how we continue to grow the impact of awesome work they do ......as such I'm looking for experienced engineering leaders who want to push boundaries across some specific areas: Engineering Practice: Standards and Excellence Lead - some one to help set the bar for our community Engineering Practice: Experience, Reuse & Intelligence Lead - someone to represent the work and voice of our community Engineering Practice: Craft & Capability Lead - someone to help accelerate craft development to allow our community do our best work If you are interested then please reach out to the amazing team of Hollie Hair George Edwards and Darcy Cotchett! #growing #recruiting
-
Nick Durkin reposted thisNick Durkin reposted thisThis week was a reminder that agents need guardrails for them, but the rest of us also need protection from them too. Earlier in the week we saw this with OpenAI, yesterday it was Anthropic. These real world challenges inspire our teams to help our customers stay safe from agents in the wild and secure the agents they build, operate and use. And what a couple of weeks we have had with Agents at Harness AppSec. Launched new Agent Security capabilities - covering both shift-left (prompt/skill/model scanning, AIBOM) and shield-right (AI firewall, AI testing, Agent Discovery and Agent Trace) - https://lnkd.in/d-stjwpU Announced Google Cloud Apigee integration for Agent Security - it’s always great to do business with friends, especially when they have the tech muscle of Google Cloud. Thanks Ritika Suri and Kevin Ichhpurani for your friendship & partnership. Announced Kong integration for Agent Security - Kong has been a long standing partner for API security and it’s exciting to expand our relationship with them. Thanks Ken Kim and Harish Madhavan for being such believers. Launched Harness AppSec Alliance, a partner program bringing together vendors across the AI-native security stack, so customers get one connected line of defense instead of stitching together point solutions themselves - https://lnkd.in/g8MDQ5Fh Joined the NVIDIA Open Secure AI Alliance for AI Safety and Security to contribute and help shape security practices and standards for AI and Agents. And if that was not enough, we just closed our largest AppSec deal ever with a payments gateway, let’s just say quite a few Ms $ and many tens of B+ calls. So if you are looking for a proven, internet-scale platform, you know where to find one!! If you are at BlackHat, come swing by the Harness AppSec Booth #2161. https://lnkd.in/guTw5dKJ If not, stay tuned for some exciting news next week!! Naresh Agarwal Sanjay Nagaraj Jyoti Bansal Sam Costello Carlos Delatorre Nick Durkin Arpit Patel Alex Valentine Gleb Brichko Jack Campbell Tom O'Reilly
-
Nick Durkin reposted thisNick Durkin reposted thisMy truck got smooshed and here is what it taught me about AI/Mythos/Hugging Face/B2B Sales... 🤭 Kidding, kind of. Over the weekend, a teenage driver smashed into my truck while driving too fast in a parking lot. The kid wasn't reckless on purpose, just inexperienced, and inexperience has a way of impacting innocent bystanders. That got me thinking about a story that broke this week in AI security. While testing a new model, OpenAI realized it escape its own sandbox, and while chasing a fairly ordinary task, the model found an unsecured endpoint left exposed by a customer of Modal. That gap let it run code on the open internet unchecked, and it used that foothold to work its way into Hugging Face and cause real damage. Nobody told this model to attack another company, it was just finishing the job it had been given, and much like that teenage driver, it didn't yet have the experience to know what should or shouldn't be attempted along the way. Here in North Carolina this time of year, you see bumper stickers everywhere that say "please be patient, new driver," and while that doesn't make me safer exactly, it does make me more careful at intersections and more aware of my surroundings, because knowing new drivers are out there changes how I drive. We're at a similar point with frontier AI agents: they're being released with very little real-world experience, and we don't have much experience managing our own safety around them either. What stuck with me almost as much as the model escaping its sandbox, is what happened after. The model exploited low hanging fruit that basic security hygiene would have closed off entirely, and you don't need a brand new AI specific tool for that. Solid API security, role based access, just in time access, and zero trust principles would have made that path harder, slower, or maybe impossible. Malicious intent or not, it doesn't change what happens to the innocent bystander. My truck didn't care that the driver meant no harm, it still has a dent. So wear your seatbelt, secure your APIs against the OWASP Top 10, and restrict access to anything facing the internet. The new drivers aren't going away anytime soon and neither are newer, more powerful agents, so innocent bystanders are on the hook to be careful and defend themselves against threats both basic and advanced. Check the related posts from a couple of my rockstar teammates: Sudhir Patamsetti - https://lnkd.in/gNgcXVUe Rahul Sood- https://lnkd.in/egTGjsnb
-
Nick Durkin reposted thisNick Durkin reposted thisMost companies debating AI coding tools are asking the wrong question. It's not "Is this worth it?" It's "Can our pipeline even handle what we just turned on?" I talked to TechForge Media about this after GitHub Copilot's five-year mark. The anniversary is a good excuse to say what I've been watching play out at nearly every enterprise this year. Give developers an AI assistant, PR volume goes up 3-5x, and the CI/CD system built for humans committing twice a day just doesn't cope. It queues, it burns compute, and security scans that used to run overnight can't keep up with what's coming in by lunch. So companies end up paying twice. Once for the AI, again for the infrastructure bill to process everything it produced, half of which gets rejected anyway. None of this is really about the AI. It's doing what it's supposed to do. The problem is everyone bought the acceleration and skipped rebuilding the pipeline to match it: the testing, the governance, the cost controls. My bet: the companies that win the next 18 months won't be the ones running the most agents. They'll be the ones whose pipeline can catch and reject bad output in seconds, not hours. Click the link for the piece if you want the details, and thanks again to Ryan Daws for including my perspective. https://lnkd.in/eiTmBNmTHarness: AI code generation exposes pipeline limitationsHarness: AI code generation exposes pipeline limitations
-
Nick Durkin shared thisAt Harness, we're focused on helping engineering teams ship faster without sacrificing quality. One of the ways we try to live that out is by including customers and users in early decisions, before things are fully baked. Right now that means testing out our new Playwright functionality. Deba Chatterjee and our team has been building out Test Intelligence, and we want to put it in front of teams who are actually using Playwright day to day, not just imagining how they might use it. If that's you, I'd love to hear from you. Drop a comment or send me a DM. https://lnkd.in/gsE-p9ApBring Playwright to Harness: No Rewrites + AI TriageBring Playwright to Harness: No Rewrites + AI Triage
Nick Durkin commented on a post
1w
Great to see you, thank you for joining us!
Nick Durkin commented on a post
1mo
Always great conversation 🚀Tyler Johnson. I owe you better F1 analogies though.
-
Nick Durkin liked thisNick Durkin liked thisWhat an incredible week in San Francisco at Unscripted! A huge thank you to Rashmi Kumar for joining Jyoti Bansal for such a thoughtful fireside chat on the impact of AI on software development! At the center of the conversation: moving from token-maxing to outcome-maxing, how roles and teams may evolve in the future, and, most importantly, keeping the human at the center, whether that’s the engineer, client, patient, or practitioner. Great conversations, great people, and a lot to think about as we navigate what comes next.
-
Nick Durkin liked thisNick Durkin liked thisRounding off an incredible fortnight for the Harness UK & South Africa team. Two weeks across Cape Town and Johannesburg with Jon Hodgson meeting customers alongside our partner Blue Turtle Technologies, focused on helping engineering teams maximise the value of an autonomous SDLC. Then straight back to London for Unscripted, our largest yet, with 500+ customers and prospects from across Europe and Africa. A highlight was Linde-Marie Ferreira picking up the Compass award, sharing how Absa Group delivered a 24% reduction in cloud costs alongside proactive AI cost management, a top priority we're seeing across enterprises today. Look forward to being back in Johannesburg in October. For anyone who couldn't make London, there's a virtual event on Wednesday: https://lnkd.in/eMs-Ab9S Jyoti Bansal Sam Costello Nick Durkin Uri Scheiner Rahul Sood Joshua Woods Mark Bubien Ross O'Neill Anthony Douglas Tarryn Keefe Allen Lewis Michael Hutchinson Marius Nauhaus Steven King Chris G. Tyler Daniel Hearn Ben Wheatley Steve Lilford Martin Grahn Lewis Molloy Jonah Ghinn Chris Holden Jack Holroyd Joshua Salter Adham Alattar Matt Keyes Minn Chowdhury Billy Mattsson Nik Papageorgiou Neus Samir Escruela
-
Nick Durkin liked thisNick Durkin liked thisThis is my third year being part of {unscripted} and every year it keeps getting better. 🥳 I've been on the road the past few weeks in NYC 🗽 , Paris 🥐 , and London 🇬🇧 and it has been incredible. The energy at every stop reminded me why we do this. Huge thank you to every speaker, partner, and attendee who made it all happen. We're wrapping it up tomorrow with our global {unscripted} Virtual event. 🚀 Gleb Brichko Amanda Peacock Sheila M. Erin Alonso Rebecca Platt Lizzie Penna Ben Hoedt Ross O'Neill Mavian Roy Olivia Howard Nikki Morgan Nick Durkin Jyoti Bansal Carlos Delatorre Trevor Stuart Eve B. Jessica Adamson Ricky Salguero, MBA Dimitra Phillos Danielle Gazitt Eiko Jian Ningjing(Julia) Chen Mitch Rymeski Michel Chrabieh Wei GUO Eliel Rosario Tina Sturgis Eric Minick
-
Nick Durkin liked thisNick Durkin liked thisthat's a wrap on stop #2!! thank you to all our customers and community members who spoke on the big stage today at Harness Unscripted Chicago! see you tomorrow, Boston ✈️🦞
-
Nick Durkin liked thisNick Durkin liked thisThe future of software delivery is autonomous. Traditional pipelines are hitting their limit as code volume surges. At Harness {unscripted}, the focus was clear: leveraging AI agents that reason, secure, and manage costs across the entire SDLC. Proud to see our Field CTO for Strategic Accounts, Paul Cavanagh, on stage for the panel “DevSecOps in 2026: Trusting AI from Design to Runtime.” Paul unpacked what it really takes to move toward trusted, AI-driven automation without losing control over governance. Amazing conversations with the crowd—can't wait for the next one! #DevSecOps #AutonomousDelivery #DevOps #SDLC #SoftwareEngineering
-
Nick Durkin liked thisNick Durkin liked thiswhat a way to end the week — NYC just wrapped stop #4 of Unscripted, and the energy was unreal 🥳 I'm continually amazed by our Harness customers who show up ready to prep, travel, and share their story on stage. heading home to see my little besties before stop #5: Paris! 🇫🇷
-
Nick Durkin liked thisNick Durkin liked thisAgentic AI means more agents, more MCP servers, more LLM calls, and a bigger attack surface with every one of them. Sudhir Patamsetti is taking the stage at API + AI Summit 2026 in LA to break down on how organizations can discover, protect, and govern agents, AI APIs, and MCPs end-to-end. Come find us at the Harness booth after to see how we're helping enterprises secure AI from discovery through runtime. https://bit.ly/4AUxoOu
-
Nick Durkin liked thisAdam Arellano so often the voice of so many people!Nick Durkin liked thisSometimes seeing someone like you gives you the language to understand yourself. I loved this from my conversation with my friend Adam Arellano. Growing up, Adam didn't have the language for gender fluidity or gender queerness. And he definitely didn't see people like himself talking openly about it. So today, part of why he does is incredibly simple...𝗛𝗲 𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗸𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳. Showing someone else that this exists. That other people feel it too. That it's okay. Sometimes visibility really matters. Presented by Hubscale Executive Search With thanks to Mastermind, Orca Security, Endor Labs, Pulse Conferences, Token Security & DoControl Want to hear more of my stories... Follow...Random Access Memories Podcast Listen...https://lnkd.in/ezZqd6JD Watch...https://lnkd.in/g_6JS2jU
-
Nick Durkin liked thisNick Durkin liked thisAgentic pipelines. Humans still in the loop (for now). AI-written code nobody's reviewed. FinOps trying to keep up with token spend. Nothing is off the table at {unscripted}.
Experience & Education
Recommendations received
3 people have recommended Nick
Join now to viewOther similar profiles
Explore more posts
Explore top content on LinkedIn
Find curated posts and insights for relevant topics all in one place.
View top content