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

Position Location:

This is a Flexible (Hybrid) position.  Flexible positions require 2 days per week in a ServiceNow office location.  We have offices in several locations, including San Francisco, CA; Pleasanton, CA; Santa Clara, CA; San Diego, CA; and Kirkland, WAPlease Note:  This position will include supporting our US Regulated Markets.

“This position requires passing a ServiceNow background screening, USFedPASS (US Federal Personnel Authorization Screening Standards). This includes a credit check, criminal/misdemeanor check and taking a drug test. Any employment is contingent upon passing the screening.  Due to Federal requirements, only US citizens, US naturalized citizens or US Permanent Residents, holding a green card, will be considered.

About the team:

We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer (IC5 Level) to join our Data Platform Engineering organization.   You will be a hands-on technical lead who will lead the design and delivery of shared, multi-tenant platform services — Postgres, queueing/streaming, and key-value stores — on Kubernetes, and serves as the technical anchor for their availability, resilience, and operating model.What you get to do in this role:You will lead the design and delivery of shared platform services — managed Postgres, queueing/streaming, and key-value/cache — that run on Kubernetes across a large global fleet and that product teams across the company depend on, owning them from design through production operation.You will act as the technical lead on major initiatives within your team, breaking down ambiguous problems — “offer HA Postgres as a service to every cluster,” “make our queueing tier survive a zone loss” — into clear, executable designs with explicit availability, durability, and cost targets.You will define the HA, failover, disaster-recovery, and multi-region architecture for the services you own, and the Kubernetes-native automation (operators, controllers, CRDs, self-service APIs) that provisions, scales, upgrades, and fails them over without human intervention.You will partner with principal and distinguished engineers to align your work with the broader platform architecture and standards, and with product teams to set consumption contracts, tenancy models, and SLOs for shared services.You will identify technical risks early and drive them to resolution, with a strong focus on reliability, scalability, and operability — leading failure-mode analysis, game days, and post-incident reviews for stateful systems.You will spend significant time hands-on — designing, coding, and reviewing the core systems your team builds, such as operators, controllers, infrastructure automation, and platform services.You will mentor mid-level and junior engineers and raise the engineering bar through code reviews, design feedback, and pairing — particularly around distributed-systems and data-service design.