Senior Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform - Kubernetes - Distributed Systems - Federal
ServiceNow2 days ago
San Diego, CA, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$150k - $262k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead the design, delivery, and production operation of shared managed Postgres, queueing/streaming, and key-value/cache platform services on Kubernetes.
- Define high-availability, failover, disaster-recovery, multi-region, and durability architectures for stateful services.
- Build Kubernetes-native operators, controllers, CRDs, infrastructure automation, and self-service APIs for provisioning, scaling, upgrades, and failover.
- Lead major technical initiatives, translate ambiguous problems into executable designs, and establish availability, cost, durability, and SLO targets.
- Drive reliability and operability through failure-mode analysis, game days, post-incident reviews, observability, and risk resolution.
- Design and code core distributed systems while reviewing implementations and mentoring junior and mid-level engineers.
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 and operating distributed systems and stateful workloads on Kubernetes at scale.
- Experience leading a shared, multi-tenant infrastructure service such as Postgres, Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ, Redis, or Valkey, including its high availability, failover, and operating model.
- Deep knowledge of replication, leader election, quorum and 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 capabilities.
- Strong 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.
- Preferred experience includes Kubernetes operators, Postgres internals, Kafka or NATS, Redis or Valkey, multi-region data services, zero-downtime upgrades, observability, multi-tenancy, container networking, service mesh, workload identity, mTLS, secrets management, managed Kubernetes, managed data services, Terraform, and Crossplane.
- Experience integrating AI into engineering or platform work, including AI-powered tooling, operational automation, agentic systems, or infrastructure workflows.
Benefits
- Flexible hybrid work persona requiring 2 days per week in a ServiceNow office; listed locations include San Francisco, Pleasanton, Santa Clara, San Diego, and Kirkland.
- Health plans including flexible spending accounts, a 401(k) plan with company match, ESPP, matching donations, flexible time away, and family leave programs.
- Regular employee position supporting US regulated markets and requiring federal personnel authorization screening, including credit, criminal/misdemeanor, and drug checks.
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.