Senior Staff Software Engineer Data Platform Kubernetes Distributed Systems Federal

Position Location:
This is a Flexible (Hybrid) position.  Flexible positions require 2 days per week in a ServiceNow office location.  We have offices in several locations including San Francisco CA; Pleasanton CA; Santa Clara CA; San Diego CA; and Kirkland WA

Please Note:  This position will include supporting our US Regulated Markets.
This position requires passing a ServiceNow background screening USFedPASS (US Federal Personnel Authorization Screening Standards). This includes a credit check criminal/misdemeanor check and taking a drug test. Any employment is contingent upon passing the screening.  Due to Federal requirements only US citizens US naturalized citizens or US Permanent Residents holding a green card will be considered.

About the team:
We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer (IC5 Level) to join our Data Platform Engineering organization.   You will be a hands-on technical lead who will lead the design and delivery of shared multi-tenant platform services Postgres queueing/streaming and key-value stores on Kubernetes and serves as the technical anchor for their availability resilience and operating model.

What you get to do in this role:

• You will lead the design and delivery of shared platform services managed Postgres queueing/streaming and key-value/cache that run on Kubernetes across a large global fleet and that product teams across the company depend on owning them from design through production operation.
• You will act as the technical lead on major initiatives within your team breaking down ambiguous problems offer HA Postgres as a service to every cluster make our queueing tier survive a zone loss into clear executable designs with explicit availability durability and cost targets.
• You will define the HA failover disaster-recovery and multi-region architecture for the services you own and the Kubernetes-native automation (operators controllers CRDs self-service APIs) that provisions scales upgrades and fails them over without human intervention.
• You will partner with principal and distinguished engineers to align your work with the broader platform architecture and standards and with product teams to set consumption contracts tenancy models and SLOs for shared services.
• You will identify technical risks early and drive them to resolution with a strong focus on reliability scalability and operability leading failure-mode analysis game days and post-incident reviews for stateful systems.
• You will spend significant time hands-on designing coding and reviewing the core systems your team builds such as operators controllers infrastructure automation and platform services.
• You will mentor mid-level and junior engineers and raise the engineering bar through code reviews design feedback and pairing particularly around distributed-systems and data-service design.

Qualifications :

To be successful in this role you have:

• Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering and platform work whether using AI-powered tooling automating operational workflows building agentic systems for fleet visibility and operations or reasoning about AIs impact on how infrastructure is built and run.
• 12 years of software development experience with a Bachelors degree; OR 8 years with a Masters degree; OR 5 years with a PhD; OR equivalent work experience.
• 8 years building production software with solid experience operating distributed systems and running stateful workloads on Kubernetes at scale.
• A track record of leading the design and delivery of at least one shared multi-tenant infrastructure service used broadly by other teams a relational database service (Postgres or similar) a message queue or streaming platform (Kafka NATS RabbitMQ or similar) or a key-value/cache service (Redis/Valkey etcd or similar) including its HA failover and operating model.
• Deep understanding of high availability and failure handling: replication topologies leader election quorum and consensus split-brain avoidance backup/restore and point-in-time recovery and designing to explicit RPO/RTO and durability targets.
• Strong system design skills you can reason rigorously about consistency models partitioning and rebalancing capacity planning tenant isolation and noisy-neighbor mitigation and communicate the trade-offs clearly to engineers and stakeholders.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major hyperscaler (AWS Azure GCP) including its core compute networking storage and IAM primitives.
• Strong working knowledge of containers and Kubernetes (including stateful primitives: StatefulSets CSI/persistent storage PDBs topology spread) CI/CD and GitOps-based delivery and infrastructure-as-code.
• Strong programming skills in Go (or strong systems-language skills with a willingness to work primarily in Go).

It also helps if you have:

• Experience building or extending Kubernetes operators that manage stateful systems (e.g. CloudNativePG Zalando/Crunchy Postgres operators Strimzi Redis/Valkey operators) and opinions on when to adopt versus build.
• Deep expertise in one of the target systems: Postgres internals (WAL streaming/logical replication vacuum connection pooling with PgBouncer/PgCat major-version upgrades); Kafka/NATS (partitioning ISR/replication exactly-once semantics consumer scaling); or Redis/Valkey (cluster mode persistence eviction hot-key handling).
• Experience running data services across multiple regions or clusters cross-region replication failover orchestration and DR testing.
• Experience with zero-downtime upgrades schema/data migrations and fleet-wide rollouts of stateful services.
• Experience with observability and SLOs for stateful systems replication lag saturation tail latency error budgets and with capacity and cost management for shared infrastructure.
• Experience designing multi-tenancy: quotas isolation chargeback/showback and self-service provisioning APIs or CRDs.
• Experience with container networking (CNI) and/or service mesh and with workload identity mTLS and secrets management as applied to data services.
• Experience with managed Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) managed data services (RDS/Aurora Cloud SQL MSK ElastiCache) and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Crossplane.

For positions in this location we offer a base pay of $149800 - $262200 plus equity (when applicable) variable/incentive compensation and benefits. Sales positions generally offer a competitive On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive compensation structure. Please note that the base pay shown is a guideline and individual total compensation will vary based on factors such as qualifications skill level competencies and work location. We also offer health plans including flexible spending accounts a 401(k) Plan with company match ESPP matching donations a flexible time away plan and family leave programs. Compensation is based on the geographic location in which the role is located and is subject to change based on work location.

Additional Information :

Work Personas

We approach our distributed world of work with flexibility and trust. Work personas (flexible remote or required in office) are categories that are assigned to ServiceNow employees depending on the nature of their work and their assigned work location. Learn more here. To determine eligibility for a work persona ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow office using a third-party service.

Equal Opportunity Employer

ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religion sex sexual orientation national origin age disability gender identity  veteran status or any other category protected by addition all qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with legal requirements. 

Accommodations

We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process or are unable to use this online application and need an alternative method to apply please contact for assistance. 

Export Control Regulations

For positions requiring access to controlled technology subject to export control regulations including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (EAR) ServiceNow may be required to obtain export control approval from government authorities for certain individuals. All employment is contingent upon ServiceNow obtaining any export license or other approval that may be required by relevant export control authorities. 

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Remote Work :

No

Employment Type :

Full-time