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ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead the design and delivery of complex components and services within their cloud-native platform. This is a high-impact technical leadership role where you will own systems from design through production operation, act as technical lead for major features and initiatives, and partner with Principal and Distinguished Engineers to ensure alignment with broader platform architecture and long-term technical strategy.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading the design and delivery of complex cloud-native platform components with end-to-end ownership
- Serving as technical lead for major features, translating ambiguous problems into clear, scalable designs
- Identifying and resolving technical risks with focus on reliability, scalability, and operability
- Maintaining hands-on involvement across the development lifecycle: designing, coding, and reviewing core systems including Kubernetes operators, controllers, infrastructure automation, and platform services
- Mentoring mid-level and junior engineers while raising the engineering bar through code reviews, design reviews, and technical guidance
- Partnering with senior leadership to drive technical strategy through architectural design reviews and cross-functional collaboration
The role emphasizes integrating AI into engineering and platform work, including AI-powered tooling, automated operational workflows, and agentic systems for fleet visibility and operations.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 14+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems and cloud-native platforms in production environments
- Demonstrated experience building and operating Kubernetes platform infrastructure at scale, with ownership through deployment, upgrades, and production operations
- Hands-on development of Kubernetes Operators, Admission Controllers, or platform extensions using Kubebuilder, Operator Framework, or similar technologies
- Experience operating both managed Kubernetes services (EKS, AKS, GKE) and self-managed Kubernetes environments
- Strong software engineering expertise in Go, with hands-on experience developing Kubernetes Operators, Controllers, CRDs, and platform automation
- Deep understanding of Kubernetes architecture including orchestration, scheduling, security, storage, networking, and workload management
- Proven experience operating stateful and distributed workloads on Kubernetes, including databases and mission-critical platform components
- Extensive experience with public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) including compute, networking, security, and identity management
- Strong background designing and building microservices, event-driven systems, and distributed application architectures
- Experience owning complex technical initiatives end-to-end from architecture through operational support
- Hands-on experience with containers, CI/CD, GitOps practices, and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Crossplane, or equivalent)
- Experience implementing observability and reliability best practices including metrics, logging, tracing, monitoring, alerting, and SLOs
- Proven ability to drive technical strategy through architectural design reviews and cross-functional collaboration
- Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering and platform work—AI-powered tooling, automated operational workflows, agentic systems for fleet visibility and operations
Good to have:
- Experience with container networking (CNI) and/or service mesh
- Experience with mTLS, workload identity, and secrets management at fleet scale
- Experience with observability—metrics, tracing, and SLOs
- Experience with Terraform, Crossplane, or similar declarative infrastructure tooling
- Experience designing or tuning distributed data or compute workloads on Kubernetes
