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ServiceNow is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for the Telemetry Data Platform team, which handles product usage and performance telemetry for the entire ServiceNow platform. The team operates a distributed system built on Kubernetes, Kafka, and ClickHouse, processing billions of records per day across Israel, India, and the Americas.
This is a full-stack role with primary focus on telemetry development, data pipelines, Kubernetes, and DevOps. You will design and own distributed systems end-to-end, from event generation through production dashboards. You will lead design and delivery of complex, multi-service features, own technical decisions within your domain, and operate with full autonomy—escalating only genuine ambiguities.
Key responsibilities include:
**Telemetry Data Pipelines**: Design, build, and own backend services for distributed data streaming and processing handling high-volume, high-cardinality event data with predictable latency and no silent data loss. Build and maintain Kafka-based streaming pipelines feeding ClickHouse. Own data modeling and query performance in ClickHouse, including partitioning, sort keys, materialized views, retention, and cost optimization. Partner with product and platform teams to shape telemetry requirements and drive solutions to production.
**Kubernetes, DevOps, and Production Ownership**: Deploy, scale, and operate services in production Kubernetes environments with Helm-based deployments and CI/CD pipelines. Own observability for your work—meaningful metrics, useful logs, real tracing, and alerts that fire on customer impact. Debug and resolve production incidents independently, participate in on-call, run root-cause analysis, and operate against defined service level objectives.
**Full Stack Engineering and Technical Leadership**: Own the full development lifecycle, building backend services and APIs that expose telemetry to internal consumers, product surfaces, and AI agents. Contribute to analytics frontends—dashboards, funnels, exploration tools—with performance optimization for large result sets. Improve web and mobile capture SDKs. Lead design of complex, multi-service features across team boundaries, drive decisions to closure, and write design docs and postmortems. Raise the bar through code review, test strategy, automation coverage, and mentoring.
The role emphasizes incident response management expertise and requires strong AI skills, including confident use of AI coding assistants, AI-assisted debugging, integrating LLM APIs into production, exposing telemetry to AI agents safely, designing safeguards for non-deterministic components, and instrumenting AI features in production.
**Requirements**:
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or closely related field (required)
- 6+ years as a backend software engineer
- 4+ years designing and operating distributed systems
- 3+ years with Kubernetes in production, including Helm and CI/CD
- 3+ years with Kafka or equivalent streaming and data pipelines
- Experience with on-call and production support
- Strong backend development in Java, Python, Go, or equivalent at production scale
- Hands-on experience building distributed systems for data streaming, processing, and storage
- Production experience deploying and managing services on Kubernetes with Helm and CI/CD
- Working knowledge of Kafka or equivalent messaging/streaming system
- Solid SQL skills and hands-on experience with columnar or analytical data stores, including query optimization and physical data modeling
- Demonstrated depth in incident response and customer escalations
- Front-end capability to build and debug data-heavy interfaces: JavaScript or TypeScript with React or Angular
**Desired qualifications**:
- Production experience with ClickHouse or another OLAP/columnar store (sharding, replication, materialized views, cost tuning)
- Exposure to observability tooling: OpenTelemetry, metrics/logging stacks, alerting platforms
- Experience building product analytics or telemetry platforms, or with stream processing frameworks like Flink or Spark
- Client-side instrumentation—web or mobile SDK development, event capture, session and consent handling
A master's degree may offset up to one year of the experience minimum. Equivalent practical experience is considered where technical depth is clearly demonstrable.
