Senior Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform - Kubernetes - Distributed Systems - Federal

Servicenow; San Diego (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

ServiceNow is hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead the design and delivery of shared platform services that run on Kubernetes across a global fleet.

You will own availability, durability, and operating models, with heavy hands-on work and mentoring responsibilities. The role requires two days per week in a ServiceNow office in the US.

Qualifications

• Minimum 12+ years of software development with a Bachelor’s; or 8+ with a Master; or 5+ with a PhD.
• 8+ years building production software and operating distributed systems on Kubernetes at scale.
• Led design and delivery of shared, multi‑tenant infrastructure services.
• Strong HA, failover, backup/restore and multi‑region considerations.
• Hands-on with major cloud providers and containerized platforms.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and delivery of shared platform services (Postgres, queueing/streaming, key‑value) on Kubernetes.
• Define architecture for HA, disaster recovery, and cross‑region operation.
• Set tenancy models, SLOs, and consumption contracts with product teams.
• Mentor mid‑level and junior engineers and drive reliability and operability.
• Hands‑on coding and review of core systems and operators.

Skills

Platform design

Kubernetes

Go programming

Distributed systems

HA/DR architectures

Cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GCP)

Postgres / data services

CI/CD / GitOps

Mentoring

Go/. Systems language

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering or equivalent

Master's degree

PhD in a related field

Tools

Postgres

Kafka / NATS / RabbitMQ

Redis / etcd

Kubernetes operators

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Position Location:

This is a Flexible (Hybrid) position. Flexible positions require 2 days per week in a ServiceNow office location. We have offices in several locations, including San Francisco, CA; Pleasanton, CA; Santa Clara, CA; San Diego, CA; and Kirkland, WA

Please Note: This position will include supporting our US Regulated Markets.

\"This position requires passing a ServiceNow background screening, USFedPASS (US Federal Personnel Authorization Screening Standards). This includes a credit check, criminal/misdemeanor check and taking a drug test. Any employment is contingent upon passing the screening. Due to Federal requirements, only US citizens, US naturalized citizens or US Permanent Residents, holding a green card, will be considered.

About the team:

We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer (IC5 Level) to join our Data Platform Engineering organization. You will be a hands-on technical lead who will lead t he design and delivery of shared, multi-tenant platform services - Postgres, queueing/streaming, and key-value stores - on Kubernetes, and serves as the technical anchor for their availability, resilience, and operating model.

What you get to do in this role:

• 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.

To be successful in this role you have:

• Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering and platform work - whether using AI-powered tooling, automating operational workflows, building agentic systems for fleet visibility and operations, or reasoning about AI's impact on how infrastructure is built and run.
• 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), and the 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 inGo).

It also helps if you have:

• Experience building or extending Kubernetes operators that ma