Senior Staff Software Engineer (Kubernetes, Operators, CRD, Go) - Federal

About the Position

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Act as the technical lead on major initiatives within your team, breaking down ambiguous problems into clear, executable designs with explicit availability, durability, and cost targets.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Spend significant time hands-on - designing, coding, and reviewing the core systems your team builds, such as operators, controllers, infrastructure automation, and platform services.
• 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.

Requirements

• Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering and platform work.
• 12+ years of software development experience with a Bachelor's degree; OR 8+ years with a Master's degree; OR 5+ years with a PhD; OR equivalent work experience.
• 8+ years building production software, with solid experience operating distributed systems and running stateful workloads on Kubernetes at scale.
• A track record of leading the design and delivery of at least one shared, multi-tenant infrastructure service used broadly by other teams.
• Deep understanding of high availability and failure handling.
• Strong system design skills.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Strong working knowledge of containers and Kubernetes, CI/CD and GitOps-based delivery, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Strong programming skills in Go (or strong systems-language skills with a willingness to work primarily in Go).

Nice to Have

• Experience building or extending Kubernetes operators that manage stateful systems.
• Deep expertise in one of the target systems: Postgres, Kafka/NATS, or Redis/Valkey.
• Experience running data services across multiple regions or clusters.
• Experience with zero-downtime upgrades, schema/data migrations, and fleet-wide rollouts of stateful services.
• Experience with observability and SLOs for stateful systems.
• Experience designing multi-tenancy.
• Experience with container networking (CNI) and/or service mesh, and with workload identity, mTLS, and secrets management as applied to data services.
• Experience with managed Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE), managed data services (RDS/Aurora, Cloud SQL, MSK, ElastiCache), and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Crossplane.

We Offer

• Base pay of $149,800 - $262,200, 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.