Senior Staff Platform Engineer - Federal

About the Position

We are looking for a Senior Staff Platform Engineer - Federal to join our team in San Diego on a Flexible (Hybrid) basis. This role requires 2 days per week in a ServiceNow office location. Our Data Platform group builds highly scalable, high-performance platform capabilities for data-in-motion and backend storage systems. We are seeking a seasoned IC5 Senior Staff Engineer with deep expertise in distributed systems and Data Lake architectures to drive next-generation platform innovation.

Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and build high-performance distributed systems and platform components.
• Build distributed systems data ingestion solutions with a strong emphasis on scalability, quality, and operational excellence.
• Deliver high-quality, clean, modular, and reusable code while enforcing engineering best practices (code reviews, unit testing, automation, design reviews).
• Build foundational libraries, frameworks, and tools focused on modularity, extensibility, configurability, and maintainability.
• Collaborate across engineering teams to refine requirements and deliver end-to-end solutions.
• Provide technical leadership for projects with significant complexity and risk.
• Research, evaluate, and adopt new technologies that enhance platform capabilities.
• Troubleshoot and diagnose complex production issues across distributed systems.

Requirements

• Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering work.
• 12+ years of hands-on engineering experience in distributed systems, data platforms, or large-scale backend infrastructure with a Bachelor's degree; OR 8+ years with a Master's degree; OR 6+ years with a PhD OR equivalent work experience.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems architecture, design patterns, and algorithms.
• Deep programming expertise in Java, including JVM internals, memory models, and garbage collection.
• Proven experience in JVM performance tuning, profiling, and diagnosing performance bottlenecks.
• Deep programming expertise and hands-on experience working with Helm (charts authoring, templating, managing overlay layering across environments).
• Strong understanding of concurrency, networking, sockets, OS internals, and performance optimization.
• Hands-on experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience with relational databases such as Oracle, MySQL, or PostgreSQL.
• Security systems, methods, and protocols.
• Experience with large-scale deployments of distributed systems.
• Deep knowledge of replication, fault-tolerant, and HA strategies.
• Experience working in DevOps environments to operationalize distributed platforms.
  • GitOps and release engineering for distributed k8s-native services.
• Strong expertise in designing and architecting platforms using:
  • Kubernetes (workload deployments, upgrades, monitoring, and maintenance).
  • Apache Iceberg (tables, catalogs, data encryption, schema evolution, metadata management).
  • Apache Kafka (high-scale clusters, topic/partition strategies, HA).
  • Apache Flink (stateful stream processing, exactly-once semantics).
  • Apache Spark (batch & streaming jobs, optimization, partitioning).
• Expertise in data formats such as Parquet, ORC, and Avro, along with compaction and governance strategies.
• Ability to build scalable, fault-tolerant ingestion and transformation workflows.
• Experience integrating Data Lakes with analytics engines, query services, or ML platforms.

We Offer

• Base pay of $181,200 - $317,100, 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.
• Competitive On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive compensation structure for sales positions.

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.