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Salary: USD 149,800 - 262,200 / annual
ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer (IC5) to lead the design and delivery of shared, multi-tenant platform services on Kubernetes. You will be a hands-on technical lead responsible for managed Postgres, queueing/streaming, and key-value stores that run across a large global fleet and are depended upon by product teams company-wide.
In this role, you will:
- Lead the design and delivery of shared platform services from design through production operation, owning their availability, resilience, and operating model
- Act as technical lead on major initiatives, breaking down ambiguous problems into clear, executable designs with explicit availability, durability, and cost targets
- Define HA, failover, disaster-recovery, and multi-region architecture for services you own, and build Kubernetes-native automation (operators, controllers, CRDs, self-service APIs) that provisions, scales, upgrades, and fails over systems without human intervention
- Partner with principal and distinguished engineers to align work with broader platform architecture and standards, and with product teams to set consumption contracts, tenancy models, and SLOs
- Identify technical risks early and drive resolution with focus on reliability, scalability, and operability—leading failure-mode analysis, game days, and post-incident reviews for stateful systems
- Spend significant time hands-on designing, coding, and reviewing core systems such as operators, controllers, infrastructure automation, and platform services
- Mentor mid-level and junior engineers and raise the engineering bar through code reviews, design feedback, and pairing, particularly around distributed-systems and data-service design
This is a hybrid position requiring 2 days per week in a ServiceNow office. Primary location is San Diego, CA, with additional offices in San Francisco, Pleasanton, Santa Clara, and Kirkland, WA.
Federal Requirements: This position supports US Regulated Markets and requires passing USFedPASS (US Federal Personnel Authorization Screening Standards), including background check, credit check, criminal/misdemeanor check, and drug test. Only US citizens, US naturalized citizens, or US Permanent Residents holding a green card will be considered.
QUALIFICATIONS:
Required:
- 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
- 8+ years building production software with solid experience operating distributed systems and running stateful workloads on Kubernetes at scale
- Track record of leading the design and delivery of at least one shared, multi-tenant infrastructure service used broadly by other teams—a relational database service (Postgres or similar), a message queue or streaming platform (Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ, or similar), or a key-value/cache service (Redis/Valkey, etcd, or similar)—including its HA, failover, and operating model
- Deep understanding of high availability and failure handling: replication topologies, leader election, quorum and consensus, split-brain avoidance, backup/restore and point-in-time recovery, and designing to explicit RPO/RTO and durability targets
- Strong system design skills—ability to reason rigorously about consistency models, partitioning and rebalancing, capacity planning, tenant isolation, and noisy-neighbor mitigation, and communicate trade-offs clearly to engineers and stakeholders
- Hands-on experience with at least one major hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, GCP), including core compute, networking, storage, and IAM primitives
- Strong working knowledge of containers and Kubernetes (including stateful primitives: StatefulSets, CSI/persistent storage, PDBs, topology spread), CI/CD and GitOps-based delivery, and infrastructure-as-code
- Strong programming skills in Go (or strong systems-language skills with willingness to work primarily in Go)
- Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering and platform work—whether using AI-powered tooling, automating operational workflows, building agentic systems for fleet visibility and operations, or reasoning about AI's impact on how infrastructure is built and run
Desirable:
- Experience building or extending Kubernetes operators that manage stateful systems (e.g., CloudNativePG, Zalando/Crunchy Postgres operators, Strimzi, Redis/Valkey operators), and opinions on when to adopt versus build
- Deep expertise in one of the target systems: Postgres internals (WAL, streaming/logical replication, vacuum, connection pooling with PgBouncer/PgCat, major-version upgrades); Kafka/NATS (partitioning, ISR/replication, exactly-once semantics, consumer scaling); or Redis/Valkey (cluster mode, persistence, eviction, hot-key handling)
- Experience running data services across multiple regions or clusters—cross-region replication, failover orchestration, and DR testing
- Experience with zero-downtime upgrades, schema/data migrations, and fleet-wide rollouts of stateful services
- Experience with observability and SLOs for stateful systems—replication lag, saturation, tail latency, error budgets—and with capacity and cost management for shared infrastructure
- Experience designing multi-tenancy: quotas, isolation, chargeback/showback, and self-service provisioning APIs or CRDs
- Experience with container networking (CNI) and/or service mesh, and with workload identity, mTLS, and secrets management as applied to data services
- Experience with managed Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE), managed data services (RDS/Aurora, Cloud SQL, MSK, ElastiCache), and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Crossplane
