Senior Staff Software Engineer (Kubernetes, Operators, CRD, Go) - Federal
ServiceNow1 month ago
Base Salary
$150k - $262k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead the design, delivery, and production operation of shared multi-tenant Postgres, queueing/streaming, and key-value/cache services on Kubernetes.
- Define high-availability, failover, disaster-recovery, multi-region, durability, and operating architectures for stateful platform services.
- Build Kubernetes-native operators, controllers, CRDs, self-service APIs, and infrastructure automation for provisioning, scaling, upgrading, and failover.
- Act as technical lead for major initiatives, translating ambiguous infrastructure problems into executable designs with availability, durability, and cost targets.
- Partner with principal and distinguished engineers and product teams on platform architecture, consumption contracts, tenancy models, and SLOs.
- Drive technical risk resolution through failure-mode analysis, game days, post-incident reviews, and reliability and scalability improvements.
- Design, code, and review core platform systems and mentor mid-level and junior engineers through reviews, pairing, and design feedback.
Requirements
- 12+ years of software development experience with a bachelor's degree, 8+ years with a master's degree, 5+ years with a PhD, or equivalent work experience.
- 8+ years building production software, including operating distributed systems and stateful workloads on Kubernetes at scale.
- Experience leading delivery of a shared, multi-tenant infrastructure service such as a relational database, message queue, streaming platform, or key-value/cache service, including HA and failover.
- Deep knowledge of replication, leader election, quorum, consensus, split-brain avoidance, backup and restore, point-in-time recovery, RPO/RTO, and durability targets.
- Strong system design skills covering consistency models, partitioning, rebalancing, capacity planning, tenant isolation, and noisy-neighbor mitigation.
- Hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP and their compute, networking, storage, and IAM primitives.
- Working knowledge of containers, Kubernetes stateful primitives, CI/CD, GitOps-based delivery, and infrastructure-as-code.
- Strong programming skills in Go or another systems language with willingness to work primarily in Go.
- Experience or critical thinking about integrating AI into engineering and platform work, including AI-powered tooling, operational automation, agentic systems, or infrastructure workflows.
- Preferred experience includes Kubernetes operators, Postgres, Kafka, NATS, Redis/Valkey, multi-region data services, zero-downtime upgrades, observability, SLOs, multi-tenancy, container networking, service mesh, workload identity, mTLS, secrets management, managed Kubernetes, managed data services, Terraform, or Crossplane.
Benefits
- Base pay is $149,800-$262,200, with equity when applicable, variable or incentive compensation, and benefits.
- Health plans, flexible spending accounts, a 401(k) plan with company match, ESPP, matching donations, flexible time away, and family leave programs are offered.
- Flexible hybrid work requires two days per week in a ServiceNow office location.
- The role is regular employment and supports US regulated markets; employment requires passing USFedPASS screening, including credit, criminal/misdemeanor, and drug checks.
- Due to federal requirements, only US citizens, naturalized US citizens, or US permanent residents holding a green card will be considered.
Tech Stack
About ServiceNow
ServiceNow builds a cloud platform for enterprise digital workflows, covering IT service management, customer service, HR service delivery, security operations, and operations management, plus tools for custom app development. It sells subscription SaaS to large organizations and public-sector agencies to automate processes and connect data across systems. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, ServiceNow is a public company listed on the NYSE under the ticker NOW.