Senior Staff Software Engineer (Kubernetes, Operators, CRD, Go) - Federal

ServiceNow; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer (IC5) to join the Data Platform Engineering organization. You will be a hands-on technical lead responsible for the design and delivery of shared, multi-tenant platform services—Postgres, queueing/streaming, and key-value stores—on Kubernetes, ensuring high availability and reliable operation.

You will mentor engineers, partner with principal engineers on architecture, and drive migration and evolution of services with strict SLOs and cost

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.
• Proven track record leading the design and delivery of shared, multi-tenant infrastructure services used broadly by other teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of shared platform services run on Kubernetes across a large global fleet.
• Act as technical lead on major initiatives, turning ambiguous problems into executable designs with availability, durability, and cost targets.
• Define HA, failover, disaster-recovery, and multi-region architecture for services and Kubernetes-based automation.
• Mentor mid-level and junior engineers and raise engineering standards through code reviews and design feedback.

Skills

AI integration

Distributed systems

Leadership

System design

Go programming

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

CI/CD tooling

GitOps

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), 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).

It also helps if you have:

• Experience building or extending Kubernetes operators that ma