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ServiceNow's Data Platform group is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer (IC5) to architect and deliver next-generation distributed systems and data platform capabilities. The team builds highly scalable, high-performance platform components for data-in-motion and backend storage systems serving customers operating at massive scale.
In this role, you will architect and design large-scale distributed platform components, lead complex technical initiatives across engineering teams, and define engineering best practices. Key responsibilities include:
• Architect, design, and build high-performance distributed systems and platform components
• Build distributed systems data ingestion solutions with emphasis on scalability, quality, and operational excellence
• Deliver high-quality, modular, and reusable code while enforcing engineering best practices (code reviews, unit testing, automation, design reviews)
• Build foundational libraries, frameworks, and tools focused on modularity, extensibility, configurability, and maintainability
• Collaborate across engineering teams to refine requirements and deliver end-to-end solutions
• Provide technical leadership for projects with significant complexity and risk
• Research, evaluate, and adopt new technologies that enhance platform capabilities
• Troubleshoot and diagnose complex production issues across distributed systems
You will bring strong hands-on engineering depth, leadership capability, and the ability to design and operate reliable, scalable, and high-performance data systems.
**REQUIREMENTS:**
**Experience Level:**
• 15–20 years of hands-on engineering experience in distributed systems, data platforms, or large-scale backend infrastructure
**Core Engineering Expertise:**
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems architecture, design patterns, and algorithms
• Deep programming expertise in Java, including JVM internals, memory models, and garbage collection
• Proven experience in JVM performance tuning, profiling, and diagnosing performance bottlenecks
• Strong understanding of concurrency, networking, sockets, OS internals, and performance optimization
• Hands-on experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems
• Experience with relational databases such as Oracle, MySQL, or PostgreSQL
**Distributed Systems Expertise:**
• Experience with large-scale deployments of distributed systems
• Deep knowledge of replication, fault-tolerant, and HA strategies
• Experience working in DevOps environments to operationalize distributed platforms
• Strong expertise in designing and architecting platforms using Kubernetes (workload deployments, upgrades, monitoring and maintenance)
• Apache Iceberg (tables, catalogs, schema evolution, metadata management) – preferred
• Apache Kafka (high-scale clusters, topic/partition strategies, HA) – preferred
• Apache Flink (stateful stream processing, exactly-once semantics) – preferred
• Apache Spark (batch & streaming jobs, optimization, partitioning) – preferred
• Expertise in data formats such as Parquet, ORC, and Avro, along with compaction and governance strategies
• Ability to build scalable, fault-tolerant ingestion and transformation workflows
• Experience integrating Data Lakes with analytics engines, query services, or ML platforms
