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ServiceNow is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own the design and delivery of significant components and core subsystems of their Kubernetes platform. You will take loosely defined platform problems and turn them into designs, plans, and shipped software with limited scaffolding from others.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning the design and delivery of core Kubernetes platform subsystems such as secrets and certificate management, workload identity, storage, or cluster networking, from design through production operation
- Taking ownership of complex platform problems end-to-end and shipping solutions
- Contributing to the architecture of distributed workloads running on the platform, working with dependent teams to get the runtime and isolation model right
- Spending most of your time hands-on in code—operators and controllers, infrastructure automation, and platform services—and in code reviews that maintain quality
- Owning the operability of what you build: SLOs, failure modes, upgrade and migration paths, and on-call responsibilities
- Partnering with senior staff and principal engineers to keep work aligned with wider platform architecture
- Mentoring engineers earlier in their careers
- Helping run a platform that serves regulated markets, where compliance constraints including FedRAMP shape design choices
Requirements:
- 8+ years building production software, including solid experience operating distributed systems
- Built and operated Kubernetes platform infrastructure in production at meaningful scale (not just consumed it); can point to specific subsystems designed, shipped, and supported through real incidents and upgrade cycles
- Strong programming skills in Go, with production Kubernetes controller or operator work
- Hands-on depth with at least one major hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, GCP)—compute, networking, IAM primitives, and their impact on cluster design
- Track record of owning complex components end-to-end, from ambiguous problem to production
- Strong working knowledge of containers, CI/CD, GitOps-based delivery, and infrastructure-as-code
- 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, or reasoning about AI's impact on infrastructure)
Nice-to-have experience:
- Managed Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) alongside self-managed clusters
- Container networking (CNI) and/or service mesh
- mTLS, workload identity, and secrets management at fleet scale
- Observability (metrics, tracing, SLOs)
- Terraform, Crossplane, or similar declarative infrastructure tooling
- Designing or tuning distributed data or compute workloads on Kubernetes
