Senior Staff Technical Product Owner FinOps Data Platform & Engineering
Santa Clara County, CA - USA
Job Summary
Team
Join the FinOps Platform Engineering organization within Global Cloud Services (GCS) the team that builds ServiceNows internal FinOps Control Tower for cloud cost governance financial accountability and unit economics across our multi-cloud estate (AWS Azure and GCP). Our organization is structured around three core teams: a Data Engineering and Data Lake team that builds the ELT pipelines landing data into our Iceberg lakehouse and owns data governance; a Platform Services team that operates our open-source platform stack (Trino Lightdash Coder Jupyter Redash Hive Metastore/Nessie); and an Analytics Engineering team that builds the dbt data models and supports analysts creating dashboards and data apps.
This role supports the first two of those teams. You will be the product voice for the data engineering and platform services workstreams working as a collaborative peer alongside the engineering leaders who own execution.
Role
As Senior Staff Technical Product Owner for FinOps Data Platform & Engineering you own the product direction for both the data lake and ELT pipeline capabilities and the platform services that data engineers and analysts build on every day. You are the connective tissue between what the organization needs from its data foundation and what the engineering teams build.
This is a hands-on technical product role embedded in engineering. You will own the backlogs for two teams translate requirements from internal users and FinOps stakeholders into concrete specifications sequence the roadmap and drive adoption. You will not manage people directly. You lead through influence deep technical judgment and close partnership with the engineering managers and senior engineers who own delivery.
Your stakeholders span both directions. Inward you serve the data engineers platform engineers and analytics engineers who use the pipelines and platforms daily. Outward you serve the FinOps practitioners finance leaders and capacity planners who depend on data landing reliably and platforms being available when they need them.
A defining part of the mandate is developer experience. The people building on this platform (data engineers using Coder workspaces writing dbt models running notebooks querying Trino) are your users too. You will advocate for improvements to their workflows and partner with the platform services manager to make those improvements real.
You will also translate data governance requirements from compliance security and enterprise governance teams into actionable engineering work. You will not define governance policy but you will ensure the platform and pipelines implement it correctly and completely.
The broader organization is migrating off Cloudera onto the modern lakehouse. You will partner closely with the Data Engineering team on this effort jointly owning the sequencing of workload migration defining readiness criteria for each wave and coordinating stakeholder communication. The Principal Engineer leads the overall migration architecture but you and the Data Engineering lead will drive the day-to-day prioritization and execution planning together.
What you get to do in this role:
Product Vision & Roadmap
Own the product vision and roadmap for FinOps data engineering (ELT pipelines data lake source onboarding) and platform services (Trino Coder Lightdash Jupyter Redash Nessie).
Define what production-ready means for data pipelines and platform services. Establish SLAs for data freshness pipeline reliability and platform availability and use them to steer prioritization.
Sequence the roadmap across both teams so that platform capabilities land ahead of the pipeline and analytics work that depends on them.
Gate roadmap phases on clear readiness criteria rather than arbitrary timelines. Ensure each phase builds on a proven foundation.
Data Engineering & Pipeline Product
Own requirements and prioritization for ELT pipeline development. Define which sources to onboard in what order and what the acceptance criteria are for each.
Specify the data contracts quality expectations and freshness SLAs for each pipeline translating business needs into work the data engineering team can build and validate against.
Drive source onboarding to be fast and repeatable. Work with data engineers to templatize and automate the path from raw source to governed lakehouse table.
Translate data governance requirements (data classification access control policies lineage retention) into concrete engineering specifications and acceptance criteria.
Ensure pipeline reliability is measurable and improving. Define the metrics track them and use them to prioritize investment in reliability over new features when needed.
Platform Services Product
Own requirements and prioritization for platform services alongside the platform services manager. Bring the user and stakeholder perspective; partner on feasibility and sequencing.
Define adoption and satisfaction targets for platform services. Understand how internal users experience Trino Coder Lightdash and Jupyter and drive improvements that reduce friction and increase self-service capability.
Advocate for developer experience improvements across the data engineering workflow. Identify pain points in how data engineers use workspaces CI/CD notebooks and query tools and work with the platform team to resolve them.
Drive platform service onboarding for new users and use cases ensuring documentation access provisioning and initial support are smooth.
Stakeholder Management & Adoption
Serve as the primary intake point for requirements from FinOps practitioners finance capacity planning and engineering teams that need data landed or platform capabilities extended.
Turn ambiguous asks into sequenced shippable work with clear acceptance criteria. Push back on scope that doesnt serve the roadmap and negotiate timelines with stakeholders when needed.
Define the measurement model for success (pipeline SLA attainment platform uptime adoption breadth source onboarding velocity developer satisfaction) and report against it.
Communicate roadmap status trade-offs and dependencies to stakeholders in terms they can act on.
Migration & Cross-Team Alignment
Partner with the Data Engineering team on Cloudera-to-lakehouse migration planning jointly owning wave sequencing readiness criteria and stakeholder communication for pipeline and platform workloads.
Coordinate with the Principal Engineer on overall migration architecture while driving the day-to-day prioritization and execution planning alongside Data Engineering leadership.
Align with the Analytics Engineering TPO (your peer) to ensure the data models and dashboards team has what it needs from the lake and platform layers.
Governance Translation
Translate enterprise data governance policies (from compliance security and data governance teams) into actionable specifications for the engineering teams.
Ensure data classification access control lineage tracking and audit requirements are implemented in both the pipelines and the platform services.
Track governance compliance across the data estate and flag gaps that need engineering investment.
Innovation & AI
Apply AI/ML tooling where it accelerates pipeline development platform operations source onboarding or data quality monitoring.
Identify opportunities to make data discovery and platform usage more self-service through automation and intelligent tooling.
What success looks like
Data pipelines meet their freshness and reliability SLAs consistently. Source onboarding is fast repeatable and well-documented.
Platform services are broadly adopted with measurable user satisfaction. Internal engineers are productive on Trino Coder and Jupyter with minimal friction.
The Cloudera-to-lakehouse migration workstreams under your purview are sequenced and progressing on schedule with stakeholders informed and no surprises at cutover.
Data governance requirements are translated into implemented controls. The engineering teams know what to build and can validate compliance.
Developer experience is improving quarter over quarter. The path from I need to build a pipeline to its running in production gets shorter and smoother.
Stakeholders trust the roadmap understand the trade-offs and feel heard even when their request is deprioritized.
Qualifications :
To be successful in this role you have:
Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes decision-making or problem-solving.
12 years in technical product ownership technical program management or product management of data platforms data engineering or infrastructure with a track record of shipping data products that internal engineering teams actually adopt. Bachelors degree required; or 10 years with a Masters degree; or a PhD with 7 years of experience in Computer Science Engineering or a related technical field; or equivalent experience.
Proven ownership of internal platform or data infrastructure as a product including defining SLAs measuring adoption and driving improvements based on user feedback.
Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous requirements from multiple stakeholder groups into concrete sequenced engineering specifications.
Experience working as a collaborative peer with engineering managers influencing roadmap and priorities without direct authority over the teams.
Strong working fluency with data engineering concepts: ELT/ETL pipelines data lake architecture data quality source onboarding and data governance implementation.
Strong working fluency with platform engineering concepts: distributed query engines developer environments BI tooling and the operational concerns of running open-source infrastructure.
Proven ability to lead through influence across teams you do not manage setting product direction and raising the quality bar.
Excellent stakeholder management across engineering data finance and executive audiences with strong technical writing and documentation skills for both engineering and business readers.
Full professional proficiency in English.
Technical Fluency
Data engineering and lakehouse. ELT pipeline patterns data lake architecture (Iceberg Hive Parquet) CDC and streaming ingestion concepts data quality frameworks and source onboarding at scale.
Platform services. Distributed query engines (Trino Presto) cloud development environments (Coder JupyterHub) BI platforms (Lightdash Redash) and catalog systems (Hive Metastore Nessie).
Data governance. Data classification access control (RBAC row-level security) lineage tracking retention policies and audit logging. Enough depth to specify requirements validate implementations and identify gaps.
Developer experience. Understanding of how data engineers work day-to-day: workspace tooling CI/CD for data pipelines notebook workflows query development and the friction points in each.
Modern data stack. dbt Trino Apache Iceberg Argo Workflows and how they compose into an end-to-end analytics platform. Enough depth to make and defend product and sequencing decisions with engineers.
Observability and SLAs. Pipeline monitoring freshness tracking platform health metrics and SLA design for internal data products.
Leadership & Communication
Proven ability to work as a collaborative peer with engineering leadership bringing stakeholder context while respecting technical feasibility and team capacity.
Strong product judgment with the ability to prioritize ruthlessly say no clearly and negotiate timelines without damaging stakeholder relationships.
Effective communication across technical and non-technical audiences. Able to present a pipeline SLA discussion to an engineering team and a roadmap trade-off to a finance VP in the same week.
Strong technical writing and documentation skills for specifications roadmaps architecture decision records and stakeholder communications.
Track record of defining success metrics for internal products and driving measurable improvement against them.
Nice to have
Direct experience with Trino dbt Apache Iceberg or similar modern data stack technologies in a product ownership or engineering role.
Experience with Coder JupyterHub or similar developer environment platforms.
Background in FinOps cloud cost management or financial data platforms.
Experience translating data governance or compliance requirements into engineering work at scale.
Familiarity with the Cloudera/Hadoop ecosystem and migration planning off legacy data platforms.
Experience with Project Nessie or other versioned/transactional catalog systems.
Experience defining and tracking developer experience metrics for internal platform teams.
Why join us
Own the product direction for the data foundation and platform services that power FinOps analytics for all of ServiceNows cloud spend at global scale.
Work at the intersection of data engineering platform engineering and data governance on a modern fully open-source stack.
Collaborate in a culture that values craftsmanship quality and innovation.
Work symbiotically with AI and automation tools that enhance excellence and drive platform reliability.
Be part of a culture that encourages innovation continuous learning and shared success.
FD21
For positions in this location we offer a base pay of $190900 - $334100 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.
From Fortune. 2026 Fortune Media IP Limited. All rights reserved. Used under license.
Remote Work :
Yes
Employment Type :
Full-time
About Company
Learn here. Grow here. Make a difference here. At ServiceNow, our cloud?based platform and solutions deliver digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity for employees and enterprises. Were growing fast, innovating even faster, and making an impact on our c ... View more