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Salary: USD 201,300 - 352,300 / annual
ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Staff Data Platform Engineer to join the Data Access Team within the Persistence organization. This is a hybrid role requiring 2 days per week in a ServiceNow office (locations include San Francisco, Pleasanton, Santa Clara, San Diego, CA, or Kirkland, WA).
About the Role
You will be a key technical leader setting the architectural direction for ServiceNow's data access layer—the foundation that enables developers and customers to access data from the platform reliably, securely, and at scale. The Data Access team owns the ServiceNow ORM and data access layer, translating logical object models into high-performance queries across multiple database engines including PostgreSQL (RaptorDB), MariaDB, Oracle, Trino, graph databases, and time-series databases. Your work will directly impact thousands of applications and millions of queries across the platform.
Key Responsibilities
- Set technical direction and architecture strategy for the data access layer, balancing scalability with delivery
- Own features from design through production delivery, turning business requirements into well-architected cross-team solutions
- Lead design and code reviews, championing performance, maintainability, and testability across multiple teams
- Define comprehensive test strategies covering functional, regression, integration, and performance testing
- Diagnose and resolve complex production issues across the stack
- Mentor engineers at all levels and raise the technical bar across the organization
- Work on core data architecture touching every part of the product, keeping it high-quality, reliable, secure, and fast
Why This Role
You'll tackle genuinely hard problems: query translation across heterogeneous engines, concurrency and locking at scale, and production issues that only surface at extreme volume. Your impact is measurable—every improvement touches the entire platform. You'll have real ownership, setting direction and shaping the roadmap alongside product and engineering leadership. The team values clean architecture, deep debugging, and collaborative problem-solving.
Requirements
- 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
- Demonstrated track record of technical leadership at Staff or Senior Staff level (or equivalent)
- Expert-level Java development
- Advanced-Expert level backend platform development
- Expert-level understanding of object-oriented and modularized software design, with emphasis on Java
- Knowledge and/or experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, Trino, etc.)
- Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, design patterns, and performance optimization at scale
- Experience with automated testing frameworks (JUnit, Selenium, TestNG) and CI/CD pipeline integration
- Deep understanding of software quality principles including reliability, observability, and production readiness
- Good understanding of cloud-based and distributed systems
- Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering work (AI-powered coding tools, workflow automation, reasoning about AI's impact on software/infrastructure)
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with ServiceNow platform
- Familiarity with RDBMS internals
- Familiarity with Neo4J and graph databases
- Passion for database technologies
- Experience with Unix shell
- Experience in DevOps environments
- Experience in customer-focused environments
