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Salary: USD 165,500 - 289,600 / annual
ServiceNow's SWAT (Software Action Team) is seeking a Senior Staff Database Engineer to ensure production stability of customer applications and infrastructure services. You will be the last line of defense for production incidents, owning stability at every service level and serving as the ultimate escalation point for internal and external customers.
In this role, you will become a subject matter expert in production database troubleshooting, ServiceNow instance performance, and Linux performance analysis across both on-premises and hyperscaler environments. You will own complex incident root cause analysis across multi-tenant PostgreSQL/MariaDB fleets at scale, develop observability tooling and automation to prevent recurrence of critical issues, influence infrastructure decisions that shape the multi-tenant cloud platform, and mentor engineers across operations, support, and development teams.
This is a high-stakes, fast-paced role requiring deep technical expertise and sharp logical reasoning. You will support the infrastructure by learning the platform end-to-end and be comfortable with on-call rotation responsibilities.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 12+ years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; OR 8+ years with a Master's degree; OR PhD with 5+ years experience; OR equivalent experience in database engineering in large-scale, enterprise environments (database-focused background required)
- Deep PostgreSQL expertise including MVCC, transaction management, vacuum mechanics, WAL architecture, advanced query performance tuning, buffer management, and backup/restore
- Experience supporting large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS, PaaS, or cloud infrastructure platforms
- Strong Unix/Linux skills: file system navigation, permissions, process management, performance diagnostics
- Deep understanding of RedHat Linux internals with hands-on expertise diagnosing CPU, memory, and I/O issues at the OS level
- Experience with public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Strong problem-solving ability, logical thinking, and genuine curiosity to understand complex systems end-to-end
- Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving
DESIRED SKILLS:
- Experience with ServiceNow platform, scripting, tuning, and troubleshooting
- Scripting proficiency: shell, Python, JavaScript, Ansible
- Experience with schemas, replication, indexing, and query optimization techniques
- Familiarity with Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines
The ideal candidate is a database engineer first—someone who has spent years going deep on database internals in production environments at large organizations, with strong logical reasoning, quick adaptation to new problems, and comfort owning high-pressure incidents end-to-end.
