Principal / Distinguished Engineer - Multi-Cloud - Control Plane - Kubernetes

About the role

The Distinguished Engineer position is a Flexible (Hybrid) role requiring 2 days per week in a ServiceNow office. The role is located in Santa Clara, CA, San Diego, CA, or Kirkland, WA.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for our cloud-native platform across multiple engineering teams and organizations, defining the architecture and standards for how Kubernetes, distributed systems, and hyperscaler infrastructure are built and operated at scale.
• Own the hardest, most ambiguous technical problems in the platform domain — multi-cloud topology, control-plane design, workload isolation, identity and trust fabric, and reliability at the scale of hundreds of clusters and dozens of product workloads.
• Partner with engineering fellows, principal engineers, and other senior technical leaders to drive consistent architectural decisions and the adoption of best practices across the entire platform ecosystem.
• Identify and mitigate the biggest technical risks in initiatives with C-suite visibility, and make the call on managed vs. self-managed tradeoffs, substrate portability, and multi-hyperscaler strategy.
• Personally design and build critical components — control planes, operators, infrastructure abstractions, and the systems other teams build on top of.
• Mentor staff and principal engineers and shape the next generation of the organization’s technical leadership.

Qualifications

• Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering and platform work — whether using AI-powered tooling, automating operational workflows, building agentic systems for fleet visibility and operations, or reasoning about AI’s impact on how infrastructure is built and run.
• 12+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production, with deep expertise running Kubernetes at scale (multi-cluster, multi-region, multi-tenant).
• Hands-on, authoritative experience across one or more major hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP), including their managed Kubernetes offerings (EKS, AKS, GKE) and the networking, IAM, and capacity tradeoffs that come with each.
• A proven track record of providing technical leadership across multiple engineering teams, influencing architecture and direction without relying on positional authority.
• Deep expertise in the core building blocks of a modern platform: the operator/controller pattern, infrastructure-as-code and control planes (e.g., Crossplane), GitOps-based delivery, container networking (CNI), and service mesh.
• Strong programming skills in Go and fluency across the cloud-native ecosystem.

It Also Helps If You Have Experience:

• Designing identity and trust fabrics for distributed systems — workload identity, mTLS, and standards such as SPIFFE/SPIRE.
• Experience with multi-tenant workload isolation and runtime security (e.g., Kata Containers, sandboxed runtimes).
• Experience building and operating platforms for regulated or federal markets (FedRAMP, air-gapped or self-hosted distribution, OCI bundling).
• Experience with observability at scale — metrics, tracing, and SLO-driven operations across a large fleet.
• A platform-as-product mindset: treating internal engineering teams as customers and the platform as a product with a roadmap, contracts, and a delivery pipeline.

Benefits

To determine eligibility for a work persona, ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow office using a third-party service. Equal Opportunity Employer ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin or nationality, ancestry, age, disability, gender identity or expression, marital status, veteran status, or any other category protected by law. In addition, all qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with legal requirements. Accommodations We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are unable to use this online application and need an alternative method to apply, please contact globaltalentss@servicenow.com for assistance. Export Control Regulations For positions requiring access to controlled technology subject to export control regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (EAR), ServiceNow may be required to obtain export license or other approval that may be required by relevant export control authorities. From Fortune. ©2026 Fortune Media IP Limited. All rights reserved. Used under license.