Senior Manager of Platform Engineering

ServiceNow; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 260,000; 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 in Santa Clara, CA seeks a Sr. Manager, Data Platform to lead a 6–10 engineer team building and operating core platform services in a cloud-native environment.

You will own end-to-end delivery, set roadmaps with product leaders, drive reliability via SLOs and on-call, and mentor engineers on design, code reviews, and career growth.

The role emphasizes strong stakeholder communication, hands-on architectural influence, and experience with hyperscalers to raise the team’s bar.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building production software and distributed systems.
• 5+ years managing software engineers and building teams.
• Hands-on experience with at least one hyperscaler (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Strong stakeholder-management and written/verbal communication skills.
• Experience operating and delivering cloud-native platform services.
• Ability to review designs, code, and influence architectural decisions.
• Focus on reliability, scalability, and reducing toil with SRE practices.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of 6–10 engineers building and operating core platform services.
• Own end-to-end delivery for the team’s domain from design to production operation.
• Set priorities and roadmaps with product and platform leadership.
• Establish SLOs, on-call practices, and operational reviews to reduce incidents.
• Collaborate with principal/distinguished engineers and other teams to align architecture and standards.
• Mentor engineers, drive hiring, onboarding, and career growth, and foster a high-trust culture.

Skills

Leadership

Kubernetes

CI/CD

GitOps

IaC

AI integration

Stakeholder management

Communication

Architectural review

Hiring & mentoring

Job description

• We are currently seeking a Sr. Manager, Data Platform who will act as a player-coach engineering leader
• You will lead a team of 6–10 engineers building and operating core platform services, owning delivery, people, and technical direction for the team’s domain
• You will lead, grow, and develop a team of software engineers who design, build, and operate services within the cloud-native platform — owning hiring, onboarding, coaching, performance, and career growth for every member of the team
• You will own end-to-end delivery for your team’s domain: setting priorities and roadmap with product and platform leadership, making scope and sequencing trade-offs, and ensuring commitments land predictably from design through production operation
• You will be accountable for the reliability, scalability, and operability of the services your team runs — establishing SLOs, on-call practices, and operational reviews, and driving down incidents and toil across hyperscaler, on-prem, and sovereign environments
• You will partner with principal and distinguished engineers, peer managers, and workload teams to align your team’s work with the broader platform architecture, standards, and the needs of the teams that depend on the platform
• You will stay close to the work as a player-coach — reviewing designs and code, weighing in on architectural decisions, and occasionally building — so that technical judgment, not just process, sets the bar for the team
• You will build a healthy, high-trust engineering culture: clear expectations, honest feedback, an inclusive environment, and a team that raises the engineering bar for itself
• You will communicate crisply with leadership and stakeholders about status, risks, and trade-offs, and represent the team in planning, capacity, and escalation conversations

Benefits

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

Strong communication and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to explain technical risks and trade-offs to both engineers and senior leadershipStrong working knowledge of containers and Kubernetes, CI/CD and GitOps-based delivery, and infrastructure-as-code — enough to review designs, challenge assumptions, and make sound technical trade-offs with your teamA track record of leading teams to deliver complex, business-critical systems or services end-to-end, from design through production operationExperience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering and platform work — whether adopting AI-powered tooling across a team, automating operational workflows, building agentic systems for fleet visibility and operations, or reasoning about how AI changes the way a platform team is staffed and runHands-on experience with at least one major hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, GCP), including its core compute, networking, and IAM primitives10+ years building production software, including substantial hands-on experience operating distributed systems and running workloads on Kubernetes5+ years managing software engineers, with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers and building teams that deliver