Senior Platform Engineer — Stateful Data Services

ServiceNow; Santa Clara (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 262,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health plans

Flexible work arrangements

Job summary

ServiceNow in Santa Clara is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer (IC5) to lead design and delivery of shared, multi-tenant platform services on Kubernetes, focusing on Postgres, messaging, and key-value stores.

You will mentor engineers, own architecture decisions, and collaborate with product teams to define SLAs and tenancy models while ensuring reliability and scale across a global fleet.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software development experience with a Bachelor's degree; OR 8+ years with a Master's 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).

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

AI in engineering

Software development

Leadership

Distributed systems

Go programming

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

Kubernetes

CI/CD

GitOps

Terraform

Job description

ServiceNow in Santa Clara is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer (IC5) to lead design and delivery of shared, multi-tenant platform services on Kubernetes, focusing on Postgres, messaging, and key-value stores.

You will mentor engineers, own architecture decisions, and collaborate with product teams to define SLAs and tenancy models while ensuring reliability and scale across a global fleet.