Senior Staff Engineer – Operations & Reliability (DevOps Focus)

ServiceNow; Santa Clara (CA); Hybrid; USD 162,000 - 285,000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative firm is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer focused on Operations and Reliability with a DevOps emphasis. This strategic role involves transforming engineering practices by implementing modern methodologies and tools to enhance reliability and efficiency. You will collaborate across teams to build a culture of continuous improvement while mentoring peers on best practices. The position offers an exciting opportunity to shape the future of product engineering in a leading organization, leveraging AI and automation to elevate operational maturity and drive systemic improvements.

Benefits

401(k) Plan with company match

Flexible spending accounts

Equity options

Flexible time away plan

Family leave programs

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with expertise in DevOps.
• Experience in managing product operations in the cloud.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement reliability dashboards and internal developer tools.
• Lead the development and rollout of DevOps practices across product engineering.

Skills

DevOps

AI Integration

Cloud Operations

Incident Management

Communication Skills

Strategic Mindset

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

AWS

Observability Tooling

Job description

Senior Staff Engineer – Operations & Reliability (DevOps Focus)

• Full-time
• Employee Type: Regular
• Region: AMS - North America and Canada
• Work Persona: Flexible

It all started in sunny San Diego, California in 2004 when a visionary engineer, Fred Luddy, saw the potential to transform how we work. Fast forward to today — ServiceNow stands as a global market leader, bringing innovative AI-enhanced technology to over 8,100 customers, including 85% of the Fortune 500. Our intelligent cloud-based platform seamlessly connects people, systems, and processes to empower organizations to find smarter, faster, and better ways to work. But this is just the beginning of our journey. Join us as we pursue our purpose to make the world work better for everyone.

We are seeking a Senior Staff Engineer with a strong background in operations, reliability, and DevOps strategy to lead the implementation of our internal DevOps practice within product engineering. This is not a traditional Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) role. Instead, it is a strategic, cross-functional leadership position focused on transforming how engineering teams think about and implement reliability, observability, automation, and continuous improvement.

As part of our product engineering organization, you will work closely with existing Operations, SRE, and Platform teams to introduce modern DevOps methodologies and tooling. You will build infrastructure relevant for product engineering and a culture to support scalable, reliable, and efficient software delivery.

This role is critical to building a future-proof, scalable, and resilient product engineering organization. You won’t just implement tools—you’ll shape how we engineer for reliability. If you're passionate about bringing people, processes, and platforms together to elevate operational maturity, this is the role for you.

What you get to do in this role:

• Build DevOps Tooling & Infrastructure:
  Design and implement reliability dashboards, AI-based alerting systems, and internal developer tools to support operational excellence.
• Drive Strategic DevOps Initiatives:
  Lead the development and rollout of DevOps practices across product engineering, including environment standardization, service readiness, and release reliability.
• Reliability Automation & Observability:
  Develop intelligent systems for automated alerting, diagnostics, and incident response using AI/ML approaches. Enhance observability through centralized dashboards and proactive monitoring.
• Foster a Culture of Continuous Improvement:
  Promote and operationalize blameless retrospectives, incident review frameworks, and feedback loops across engineering teams to drive systemic improvements.
• Enable Incident Management Excellence:
  Partner with SRE and Operations to introduce scalable, consistent, and data-informed incident management processes.
• Collaborate Across Teams:
  Act as a liaison between product engineering and infrastructure/SRE teams, ensuring seamless integration of reliability goals with day-to-day engineering workflows.
• Mentor & Influence:
  Guide engineers and leaders in adopting DevOps best practices, champion reliability principles, and mentor peers on systems thinking and operational maturity.

To be successful in this role you have:

• Experience in leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving. This may include using AI-powered tools, automating workflows, analyzing AI-driven insights, or exploring AI’s potential impact on the function or industr
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise in DevOps, operations, or infrastructure tooling. Demonstrated success in leading large-scale reliability or DevOps initiatives across engineering organizations.
• Extensive experience in managing product operations in the cloud. Strong knowledge of observability tooling.
• Hands-on experience building internal tooling for automation, alerting, and developer enablement.
• Experience with containerization technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker. Familiarity with cloud services like AWS and VMware on AWS.
• Deep familiarity with modern incident management frameworks and post-incident review practices.
• Experience in high-availability architecture, scalability strategies, monitoring, alerting, and observability.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to drive consensus and alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strategic mindset with the ability to assess and prioritize long-term initiatives over reactive fixes.

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $162,600 - $284,600, 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.

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.Learn more here .

Equal Opportunity Employer

ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin or nationality, ancestry, age, disability, gender identity or expression, marital status, veteran status, or any other category protected by law. In 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 [emailprotected] 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.