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ServiceNow is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the design and delivery of complex components and services within their cloud-native platform. This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you will own systems from design through production operation, act as the technical lead for major features and initiatives, and partner with other Principal and Distinguished Engineers to ensure alignment with broader platform architecture and long-term technical strategy.
You will identify technical risks early and drive them to resolution with a focus on reliability, scalability, operability, and engineering excellence. The role maintains a strong hands-on presence across the development lifecycle, including designing, coding, and reviewing core systems such as Kubernetes operators, controllers, infrastructure automation, and platform services. You will mentor mid-level and junior engineers while raising the engineering bar through code reviews, design reviews, technical guidance, and collaborative problem-solving.
ServiceNow is positioning itself as an AI control tower for business reinvention, and this role emphasizes integrating AI into engineering and platform work—including AI-powered tooling, automated operational workflows, agentic systems for fleet visibility and operations, and reasoning about AI's impact on how infrastructure is built and run.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 14+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems and cloud-native platforms in production environments
- Demonstrated experience building and operating Kubernetes platform infrastructure at scale, with ownership of platform capabilities through deployment, upgrades, and production operations
- Hands-on development of Kubernetes Operators, Admission Controllers, or other platform extensions using Kubebuilder, Operator Framework, or similar technologies
- Experience operating both managed Kubernetes services (EKS, AKS, GKE) and self-managed Kubernetes environments
- Experience supporting cloud-native database platforms, large-scale data infrastructure, or stateful services on Kubernetes
- Strong software engineering expertise in Go, with hands-on experience developing Kubernetes Operators, Controllers, Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), and platform automation capabilities
- Deep understanding of Kubernetes architecture, including orchestration, scheduling, security, storage, networking, and workload management
- Proven experience operating stateful and distributed workloads on Kubernetes, including databases, data services, or other mission-critical platform components
- Extensive experience with public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including compute, networking, security, and identity management services
- Strong background designing and building microservices, event-driven systems, and distributed application architectures
- Experience owning complex technical initiatives end-to-end, from architecture and design through implementation, deployment, and operational support
- Hands-on experience with containers, CI/CD, GitOps practices, and Infrastructure-as-Code using tools such as Terraform, Crossplane, or equivalent technologies
- Experience implementing observability and reliability best practices, including metrics, logging, tracing, monitoring, alerting, and service-level objectives
- Proven ability to drive technical strategy through architectural design reviews, technical proposals, and cross-functional collaboration
- Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering and platform work
Good to have:
- Experience with container networking (CNI) and/or service mesh
- Experience with mTLS, workload identity, and secrets management at fleet scale
- Experience with observability—metrics, tracing, and SLOs
- Experience with Terraform, Crossplane, or similar declarative infrastructure tooling
- Experience designing or tuning distributed data or compute workloads on Kubernetes
