Senior Staff Software Engineer (Kubernetes, Operators, CRD, Go) - Federal
ServiceNow7 hours ago
Base Salary
$150k - $262k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead the design, delivery, and production operation of shared multi-tenant PostgreSQL, queueing/streaming, and key-value/cache services on Kubernetes.
- Define high-availability, failover, disaster-recovery, and multi-region architectures with explicit availability, durability, cost, RPO, and RTO targets.
- Build Kubernetes-native operators, controllers, CRDs, self-service APIs, and infrastructure automation for provisioning, scaling, upgrading, and failover.
- Serve as technical lead for major initiatives, resolving ambiguous distributed-systems and platform architecture problems.
- Drive reliability and operability practices including failure-mode analysis, game days, post-incident reviews, observability, and SLO management.
- Design, code, and review core platform systems and mentor 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, including operating distributed systems and stateful workloads on Kubernetes at scale.
- Experience leading the design and delivery of a broadly used shared multi-tenant infrastructure service such as PostgreSQL, Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ, Redis, or Valkey.
- Deep knowledge of high availability, 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.
- 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, data migrations, observability, SLOs, multi-tenancy, container networking, service mesh, workload identity, mTLS, secrets management, managed Kubernetes, managed data services, Terraform, or Crossplane.
- Experience integrating AI into engineering or platform work, such as AI-powered tooling, operational automation, agentic fleet-operations systems, or analysis of AI's impact on infrastructure.
Benefits
- Flexible hybrid work persona requiring two days per week in a ServiceNow office, with offices including 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 full-time employment supporting US regulated markets and contingent on passing USFedPASS screening, including credit, criminal/misdemeanor, and drug testing.
- Only US citizens, naturalized citizens, or US permanent residents holding a green card will be considered for this federal role.
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.