Director, Compute Engineering

About the Position

Director, Compute Engineering

Join ServiceNow as a Director, Compute Engineering to lead the engineering organization in building and operating our compute platform.

Responsibilities

• Lead the compute engineering organization, providing technical leadership, mentoring, and career development for managers and engineers.
• Own the roadmap for the compute scheduler, including placement, bin-packing, prioritization, preemption, and fairness across workloads.
• Define and drive the compute-at-scale model, including unit economics such as cost per workload, utilization, and capacity headroom.
• Lead capacity management for private and public cloud: demand forecasting, reservations, procurement, and cross-cloud placement.
• Establish and scale a performance engineering practice: benchmarking, load and scale testing, regression detection, and SLOs for scheduling latency and throughput.
• Apply AI and ML to demand forecasting, anomaly detection, and placement optimization. Set the AI/ML roadmap and decide where it outperforms heuristics.
• Work with product management, SRE, FinOps, and infrastructure partners to set priorities and tie capacity decisions to cost and customer outcomes.
• Drive engineering excellence through architecture reviews, design standards, and modern software and DevOps practices.
• Anticipate technical and organizational risks that affect multiple products or platforms, and provide clear, structured mitigations.
• Assess availability, scalability, and operational risk across compute systems, and lead the optimization work that follows.
• Manage resources, staffing, and succession planning to build and retain a best-in-class engineering organization.
• Share best practices and engineering standards with other teams across the organization.
• Define success measures for the first 12 to 18 months, such as utilization gains, scheduler latency targets, forecast accuracy, and cost per unit.

Requirements

• Experience: 15+ years of software engineering experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 12 years with a Master's degree; or a PhD with 8 years of experience.
• People Management: 5+ years of people management experience, ideally leading software or systems engineering teams in a global 24x7 production environment.
• Technical Skills:
  • Experience building or operating large-scale schedulers or resource managers, such as Kubernetes, Slurm, or internal equivalents.
  • Deep expertise in distributed systems, system design, and capacity planning at scale.
  • Hands-on experience applying ML in production, including models, feature pipelines, or ML platforms.
  • Experience running performance engineering or capacity management across hybrid or multi-cloud estates, including private cloud and public cloud platforms.
  • Fluency in multiple programming languages (such as Java, Python, or Go) and strong system design judgment.
  • Experience with CI/CD, DevOps, configuration management at scale, and automation tools.
  • Deep background in Linux systems architecture and engineering on a global scale.
  • Working knowledge of infrastructure components, including hardware platforms, operating systems, virtualization, cloud platforms, and web applications and databases.
  • Financial acumen on cloud and infrastructure spend, including cost modeling and FinOps practices.
  • Demonstrated experience using AI to improve work processes, decision-making, or problem solving.
  • Ability to define problems, collect data, establish facts, and draw valid conclusions.
  • Strong leadership, communication, and cross-functional skills, with a record of building consensus and driving complex projects to completion.

Nice to Have

• Experience with ML-driven scheduling, forecasting, or capacity optimization.
• Experience with release management and managing large-scale server infrastructure.

We Offer

• Base Pay: $221,200 - $387,100 per year, plus equity (when applicable), variable/incentive compensation, and benefits.
• Health plans, including flexible spending accounts.
• 401(k) Plan with company match.
• ESPP.
• Matching donations.
• Flexible time away plan and family leave programs.

About the Company

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. We're building an AI-native culture where technology and talent are unstoppable together. And we're just getting started.

Join us to put AI to work for people.

Equal Opportunity Employer

ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, gender identity, 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 [email protected] 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 control approval from government authorities for certain individuals. All employment is contingent upon ServiceNow obtaining any export license or other approval that may be required by relevant export control authorities.