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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 Kubernetes platform. This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you will own major features and initiatives from design through production operation.
In this role, you will:
- Lead the design and delivery of complex components and services within the cloud-native platform, owning them from design through production operation
- Act as the technical lead for major features and initiatives, translating ambiguous problems into clear, scalable, and executable designs
- Partner with Principal and Distinguished Engineers to ensure alignment with broader platform architecture, engineering standards, and long-term technical strategy
- Identify technical risks early and drive them to resolution, with a strong focus on reliability, scalability, operability, and engineering excellence
- Maintain 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
- Mentor mid-level and junior engineers while raising the engineering bar through code reviews, design reviews, technical guidance, and collaborative problem-solving
ServiceNow is an AI control tower for business reinvention, bringing together any AI, any data, and any workflow to help enterprises work smarter and faster. The company serves 85% of the Fortune 500.
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
- Hands-on expertise in Go, with experience developing Kubernetes Operators, Controllers, Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), and platform automation capabilities
- Hands-on Kubernetes architecture knowledge, 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—AI-powered tooling, automated operational workflows, agentic systems for fleet visibility and operations, or reasoning about AI's impact on how infrastructure is built and run
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
