Senior Manager of Database Performance Engineering

ServiceNow; Dublin; On-site; EUR 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous family leave

Matched donations

Annual learning stipends

Flexible PTO

Competitive retirement plan

Paid volunteer time

Job summary

ServiceNow is seeking an experienced Sr Manager for our Database Engineering team to lead performance, reliability, and efficiency across PostgreSQL-based systems in a large-scale production environment. You will drive strategy, oversee incident resolution, and promote automation to scale operations.

The ideal candidate brings 10+ years in database/performance engineering, strong leadership, and a track record of reducing latency and improving platform resilience for enterprise SaaS deployments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computing Science or related field required.
• 10+ years in database engineering, performance engineering, site reliability or large-scale platform operations.
• Strong PostgreSQL and distributed database architecture expertise.
• Experience leading high-performing engineering teams and incident response for customer-critical issues.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the strategy for database performance, scalability, and efficiency across large-scale production environments.
• Lead initiatives to improve query performance, reduce latency, optimize workload distribution, and eliminate bottlenecks.
• Establish performance benchmarks, tuning standards, and engineering best practices.
• Champion proactive monitoring and automation to improve operational health and reliability.
• Build and develop a world-class team of performance and reliability engineers.

Skills

PostgreSQL

Distributed systems

Leadership

Incident response

On-call management

Performance tuning

Query optimization

Automation

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computing Science or related field

Tools

ServiceNow

MySQL/MariaDB

Job description

• ServiceNow is seeking an experienced Sr Manager for our Database Engineering team
• This leader will drive engineering excellence across database performance, incident management, reliability engineering, observability, and capacity planning. The role requires deep technical expertise in PostgreSQL-based/equivalent architectures, large-scale distributed systems, and customer-facing production environments, combined with strong people leadership and operational rigor
• Define and execute the strategy for database performance, scalability, and efficiency across large-scale production environments
• Lead initiatives to improve query performance, reduce latency, optimize workload distribution, and eliminate systemic bottlenecks
• Establish performance benchmarks, tuning standards, and engineering best practices
• Partner with application, platform, and infrastructure teams to ensure performance considerations are incorporated into every stage of the software lifecycle
• Establish performance, reliability, and availability goals for critical database services
• Champion proactive monitoring, observability, and automation to improve operational health
• Lead the resolution of complex production issues and customer-critical escalations
• Drive deep root cause analysis and ensure sustainable corrective actions are implemented
• Partner with engineering leaders to shape RaptorDB platform strategy and architecture
• Build and develop a world-class team of performance and reliability engineers
• Team management, recruitment, career development, objective setting, projects prioritization and performance review
• Experience of managing an ‘on call’ team covering 24 x 7
• Drive a culture of intolerance of repetitive manual activities by promoting efforts towards automation, thus enabling scaling and removing in-efficiency
• Drive initiatives with partner teams to improve the reliability of the ServiceNow application and platform
• Act as part of the escalation crisis management team to orchestrate actions towards sustainable solutions
• Analysis and evaluation of existing processes to drive continuous improvement and efficiencies
• Provide training, documentation and support to partner teams that interface with SWAT
• Onboarding of new hires to enable their success in their roles
• Onboarding of new technologies, systems and automations into the team

Benefits

• Generous family leave
• Matched donations
• Annual learning stipends
• Flexible PTO
• Competitive retirement plan
• Paid volunteer time

The ideal candidate has experience leading high-performing engineering teams responsible for solving complex performance challenges, responding to critical customer escalations, and building sustainable solutions that improve platform resilience at scaleYou should have experience with large scale Web applications and MySQL/MariaDB environments and a knack for problem solving and optimization databases, application and performance issues. Qualified candidates will be responsible for leading a team of highly skilled engineers that push the limits of scalabilityEnjoy problem solving and an analytical mindset to help determine the reasons why things fail?Have a technical background in roles including DBA, systems/cloud engineering or DevOps?Have an attitude of continuous improvement and strive to remove in-efficient process?Know Linux operating systems and Databases to the level of troubleshooting and diagnostics?Have experience in leading a team of engineers and people management?Experience leading major incident response and customer-critical production escalationsKnowledge of principles and methods involving ITILOutstanding interpersonal skills and strong communication skills, both written and verbalStrong understanding of query optimization, execution planning, indexing strategies, replication, concurrency control, and workload managementExperience working in software, platform and infrastructure delivered as a service5+ years of engineering leadership experience managing high-performing technical teamsExperience with large-scale SaaS or cloud-native platforms supporting enterprise customers10+ years of experience in database engineering, performance engineering, site reliability engineering, or large-scale platform operationsUncompromising attention to detailStrong analytical, communication, and stakeholder management skillsDeep expertise in PostgreSQL and distributed database architecturesBachelor’s degree in Computing Science or related technical field, or equivalent work experienceExperience of using ServiceNowDemonstrated ability to influence technical strategy across multiple engineering organizationsExperience building automation frameworks for operational excellence and incident reductionExperience operating PostgreSQL at hyperscale