Senior Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform - Kubernetes - Distributed Systems - Federal
ServiceNow2 days ago
Santa Clara, CA, 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, durability, and operating 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 infrastructure problems into executable designs, and establish availability, cost, durability, and recovery 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 such as Postgres, Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ, Redis, Valkey, or etcd, including HA, failover, and its 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 involving 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 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, such as AI-powered tooling, operational automation, agentic fleet operations, or infrastructure workflow improvements.
- Preferred qualifications include Kubernetes operator development, Postgres internals, Kafka or NATS expertise, Redis or Valkey expertise, multi-region data services, zero-downtime upgrades, schema and data migrations, observability, SLOs, capacity and cost management, multi-tenancy, container networking, service mesh, workload identity, mTLS, secrets management, managed Kubernetes, managed data services, Terraform, or Crossplane.
Benefits
- Flexible hybrid work arrangement 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 full-time employment supporting US regulated markets and requiring ServiceNow's USFedPASS background screening, including credit, criminal or misdemeanor, and drug-test checks.
- Employment is limited to US citizens, US naturalized citizens, or US permanent residents holding a green card.
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.