Senior Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform - Kubernetes - Distributed Systems - Federal
ServiceNow2 months ago
Kirkland, WA, USAStaff+
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, and durability architectures for stateful platform services.
- Build Kubernetes-native operators, controllers, CRDs, self-service APIs, infrastructure automation, and platform services.
- Lead major technical initiatives, translate ambiguous problems into executable designs, and establish availability, cost, durability, and SLO targets.
- Drive failure-mode analysis, game days, post-incident reviews, reliability improvements, scalability work, and operability for stateful systems.
- Design and review core systems hands-on and mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, design feedback, and pairing.
- Partner with principal and distinguished engineers and product teams on platform architecture, tenancy models, consumption contracts, and SLOs.
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 running stateful workloads on Kubernetes at scale.
- Experience leading the design and delivery of a broadly used shared multi-tenant infrastructure service, 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 primitives.
- 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.
- Experience or critical thinking about integrating AI into engineering and platform work.
- Preferred experience includes Kubernetes operators, Postgres, Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ, Redis, Valkey, etcd, multi-region data services, zero-downtime upgrades, migrations, observability, SLOs, multi-tenancy, container networking, service mesh, workload identity, mTLS, secrets management, managed Kubernetes, managed data services, Terraform, and Crossplane.
Benefits
- Base pay of $149,800-$262,200 plus equity when applicable, variable or incentive compensation, and benefits.
- Health plans including flexible spending accounts, a 401(k) plan with company match, ESPP, matching donations, flexible time away, and family leave programs.
- Flexible hybrid work persona requiring 2 days per week in a ServiceNow office; listed offices include San Francisco, Pleasanton, Santa Clara, San Diego, and Kirkland.
- Regular employee position supporting US regulated markets and requiring ServiceNow background screening, including USFedPASS, credit, criminal or 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.