SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 240,100 - 420,200 / annual
ServiceNow is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the technical direction of its cloud-native platform across multiple engineering teams. You will define architecture and standards for Kubernetes, distributed systems, and hyperscaler infrastructure at scale, solving complex technical problems including multi-cloud topology, control-plane design, workload isolation, identity and trust fabric, and reliability across hundreds of clusters serving dozens of product workloads.
In this role, you will collaborate with other principal engineers, engineering fellows, and senior technical leaders to drive consistent architectural decisions and best practices across the platform ecosystem. You will identify and mitigate major technical risks in high-visibility initiatives, mentor staff and senior engineers, and shape the next generation of technical leadership within the organization.
Key responsibilities include:
- Setting technical direction for cloud-native platform architecture across multiple teams
- Solving ambiguous, high-impact distributed systems problems at scale
- Designing and operating Kubernetes infrastructure across multi-cluster, multi-region, multi-tenant environments
- Providing technical leadership and influencing architecture decisions without relying on positional authority
- Mentoring senior and staff engineers
- Integrating AI into platform engineering and operational workflows
REQUIREMENTS:
Must-have:
- 15+ years of experience with a Bachelor degree (or 12+ years with a Master's degree) designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production
- Deep expertise running Kubernetes at scale (multi-cluster, multi-region, multi-tenant)
- Hands-on experience across one or more major hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and their managed Kubernetes offerings (EKS, AKS, GKE)
- Proven track record of providing technical leadership across multiple engineering teams and influencing architecture without positional authority
- Deep expertise in: operator/controller patterns, infrastructure-as-code and control planes (e.g., Crossplane), GitOps-based delivery, container networking (CNI), and service mesh
- Strong programming skills in Go and fluency across the cloud-native ecosystem
- Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering and platform work
Nice-to-have:
- Experience designing identity and trust fabrics (workload identity, mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE)
- Experience with multi-tenant workload isolation and runtime security (Kata Containers, sandboxed runtimes)
- Experience building platforms for regulated/federal markets (FedRAMP, air-gapped distribution, OCI bundling)
- Experience with observability at scale (metrics, tracing, SLO-driven operations)
- Platform-as-product mindset treating internal teams as customers
