Senior Staff Data Platform Engineer - Data Access Team

The Data Access team is responsible for translating customers' data requests from the ServiceNow platform and accurately querying the database using our home-grown SQL generation engine. This team is responsible for SQL generation into Trino, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and Oracle databases, as well as table management and database metadata.

About the role

As Part Of The Persistence Organization, You'll Be Building The Backbone Of The ServiceNow AI Platform — The System That Powers Reliability, Scale, And Intelligent Transformation. You Will Help Innovate to bring better (quality, performant, scalable, secure) access to our data platform that internal and external customers build upon Push IO, transaction, and concurrency limits across relational, time-series, and columnar stores Innovate to bring more capability to developers and automation to end customers

Responsibilities

• Work on top of core data architecture that touches every part of our product, ensuring our systems maintain quality, reliability, security and performance.
• Be a master at managing and enhancing a complex codebase with quality and speed.
• Deliver projects on time and with quality, with other engineers in tow.
• Set technical direction and architecture strategy for the Data Access team's systems, ensuring long-term scalability and maintainability.
• Collaborate with product managers and engineering leadership to translate business requirements into well-architected, cross-team technical solutions, owning features from design through delivery.
• Drive design and code reviews, championing best practices in performance, maintainability, and testability across multiple teams.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning and engineering excellence, sharing best practices in engineering and quality across the broader organization.
• Having aptitude for learning new technologies quickly.
• Mentor junior, senior, and staff-level engineers to help them thrive in a complex codebase, raising the technical bar across the team.
• Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering work — whether using AI-powered coding and operational tooling, automating workflows, or reasoning about how AI changes the way software and infrastructure are built.

Qualifications

• Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering work — whether using AI-powered coding and operational tooling, automating workflows, or reasoning about how AI changes the way software and infrastructure are built.
• 10+ years of software development experience with a Bachelor's degree; OR 8+ years with a Master's degree; OR 6+ years with a PhD OR equivalent work experience.
• Demonstrated track record of technical leadership at a Staff or Senior Staff level (or equivalent).
• Expert level with core Java development
• Advanced-Expert level of backend platform development
• Expert-level understanding of best practices for object-oriented and modularized software, with emphasis on Java
• Knowledge and/or experience with relational databases: PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, MariaDB, MS SQL Server, Trino, etc.
• Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, design patterns, and performance optimization at scale
• Experience with automated testing frameworks (e.g., JUnit, Selenium, TestNG) and integrating tests into CI/CD pipelines
• Deep understanding of software quality principles including reliability, observability, and production readiness
• Good understanding of cloud-based and distributed systems
• Experience leveraging critical thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving — including AI-powered tools, automating workflows, or analyzing AI-driven insights