ServiceNow
Senior Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform - Kubernetes - Distributed Systems - Federal
$150K–$262K
Santa Clara, CALIFORNIA, United States +2 · Hybrid · Senior Staff · Full-time · Posted Sep 27, 2026
- Location
- Santa Clara, CALIFORNIA, United States
San Diego, CALIFORNIA, United States
Kirkland, Washington, United States - Experience
- 12+ years with a Bachelor's degree; OR 8+ years with a Master's degree; OR 5+ years with a PhD; OR equivalent work experience. Also requires 8+ years building production software.
- Education
- Bachelor's degree, Master's degree, or PhD, with the stated experience alternatives; equivalent work experience is also accepted.
- Visa sponsorship
- Due to Federal requirements, only US citizens, US naturalized citizens or US Permanent Residents, holding a green card, will be considered.
About the job
Leads the design, implementation, and production operation of shared, multi-tenant data platform services on Kubernetes, including databases, queueing/streaming, and key-value stores.
What you'll do
- Design and operate highly available platform services, including their failover, disaster recovery, automation, and service-level objectives.
- Lead technical initiatives and contribute hands-on through system design, coding, and code review.
- Identify and resolve reliability risks, and mentor engineers on distributed systems and data-service design.
What they ask for
- 12+ years of software development with a Bachelor's degree; OR 8+ years with a Master's degree; OR 5+ years with a PhD; OR equivalent work experience.
- 8+ years building production software, operating distributed systems, and running stateful workloads on Kubernetes at scale.
- Led design and delivery of at least one broadly used, shared multi-tenant infrastructure service, including its HA, failover, and operating model.
- Strong Kubernetes, hyperscaler, distributed-systems, and programming skills; Go or systems-language skills with willingness to work primarily in Go.
Nice to have
- Experience building or extending Kubernetes operators for stateful systems.
- Expertise in Postgres, Kafka/NATS, or Redis/Valkey; multi-region data services, upgrades, observability, or multi-tenancy.
Pay
$149,800 - $262,200 USD base salary
Tools
Postgres, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP, Go, Kafka, Redis/Valkey
AI focus
Use or critically assess AI in engineering and platform work, including AI-powered tooling, operational workflow automation, agentic fleet operations, and AI's impact on infrastructure.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative