Senior Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform - Kubernetes - Distributed Systems - Federal
ServiceNow2 days ago
Kirkland, WA, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$150k - $262k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead design and delivery of shared, multi-tenant Postgres, queueing/streaming, and key-value/cache services on Kubernetes.
- Own platform services from design through production operation across a large global fleet.
- Define high-availability, failover, disaster-recovery, multi-region, and Kubernetes-native automation architectures.
- Design operators, controllers, CRDs, self-service APIs, and infrastructure automation for provisioning, scaling, upgrading, and failover.
- Lead major technical initiatives, failure-mode analysis, game days, and post-incident reviews for stateful systems.
- Design, code, and review core distributed systems and platform services.
- Partner with principal and distinguished engineers and product teams on platform architecture, consumption contracts, tenancy models, and SLOs.
- Mentor junior and mid-level engineers and raise engineering quality through reviews, design feedback, and pairing.
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 delivery of a broadly used shared, multi-tenant infrastructure service such as Postgres, Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ, Redis, Valkey, or etcd, including its HA, failover, and operating model.
- Deep understanding 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 integrating AI into engineering or platform work through AI-powered tooling, operational automation, agentic systems, or related approaches.
- Preferred experience includes Kubernetes operators, Postgres internals, Kafka or NATS, Redis or 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
- Flexible hybrid work persona requiring two days per week in a ServiceNow office.
- 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 subject to 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.