Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform - Kubernetes - Distributed Systems - Federal

It all started when engineer Fred Luddy wrote code that automated a tedious task for his coworker, Phyllis. She cried tears of joy. That moment inspired Fred to build a company that could do that for everyone—freeing people from busywork so they could focus on meaningful work. Today, ServiceNow is the AI control tower for business reinvention. Our ServiceNow AI platform brings together any AI, any data, and any workflow—helping 85% of the Fortune 500® work smarter, faster, and better.

This is a Flexible (Hybrid) position requiring 2 days per week in a ServiceNow office location (e.g., San Francisco, CA; Pleasanton, CA; Santa Clara, CA; San Diego, CA; or Kirkland, WA). This role supports US Regulated Markets and requires passing a ServiceNow background screening, including credit check, criminal/misdemeanor check, and drug test. Only US citizens, US naturalized citizens, or US Permanent Residents holding a green card will be considered.

About The Team

As a Staff Software Engineer with the Data Platform organization, you will be responsible for designing and implementing features and services within our cloud-native platform.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate components and services within the cloud-native platform, taking features from design through to production.
• Lead well-scoped projects within your team, turning requirements and rough ideas into solid technical designs and delivering them.
• Collaborate with senior, staff, and principal engineers to align your work with the platform’s architecture and standards.
• Contribute to the reliability, scalability, and operability of what you build—writing tests and instrumentation, improving runbooks, and participating in on-call.
• Spend most of your time hands-on building—operators, controllers, automation, and platform services that other teams depend on.
• Help onboard and mentor junior engineers through code review, design feedback, and pairing.

Requirements

• 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.
• 8+ years of software development experience with a Bachelor's degree; OR 5+ years with a Master's degree; OR 3+ years with a PhD; OR equivalent work experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience building, deploying, and operating workloads on Kubernetes.
• Working experience with at least one major hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, GCP), including its core compute, networking, and IAM primitives.
• A track record of delivering complex features or services as a key contributor.
• Solid working knowledge of containers, CI/CD and GitOps-based delivery, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Strong programming skills in Go (or another systems language with a willingness to work primarily in Go).

Skills

• Experience building Kubernetes controllers or working with the operator pattern.
• Familiarity with container networking (CNI) or service mesh.
• Experience with workload identity, mTLS, or secrets management.
• Experience with observability—metrics, tracing, and dashboards.

Pay

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $149,800 - $262,200, plus equity (when applicable), variable/incentive compensation, and benefits. Sales positions generally offer a competitive On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive compensation structure. Individual total compensation will vary based on factors such as qualifications, skill level, competencies, and work location.

Benefits

• Health plans, including flexible spending accounts.
• 401(k) Plan with company match.
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP).
• Matching donations.
• Flexible time away plan and family leave programs.