About the Position

We are seeking a Sr Staff Software Engineer with 12+ years of experience to lead architecture across multiple teams in San Diego, building scalable data-access and data-movement products.

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end architecture for Zero Copy Connectors, including federated query path, pushdown, connection pooling, caching, authentication, and connector-framework extensibility.
Drive the technical direction of Remote Process Sync, focusing on throughput, parallel processing, ordering guarantees, resiliency, and supportability.
Architect Private Connectivity (Reverse Tunnel) for secure, outbound-initiated access to customer data sources behind firewalls.
Provide cross-team technical leadership across the Workflow Data Fabric (WDF) portfolio, ensuring coherent designs, shared frameworks, and consistent security and governance patterns.
Lead architecture and design reviews; write and approve technical specifications; make and document trade-offs with long-term maintainability in mind.
Write production code in critical paths, prototype new approaches, and review code across teams to raise the engineering bar.
Define and drive performance and scalability strategy, including benchmarks, capacity models, and end-to-end performance validation.
Serve as the senior technical escalation point for complex production and customer issues; drive root-cause analysis and turn recurring issues into durable platform fixes, observability, and runbooks.
Partner with Product Management, Engineering Managers, Quality Engineering, Support, and adjacent platform teams to shape roadmaps, sequence technical investments, and de-risk delivery commitments.
Mentor and grow senior and staff engineers; build technical depth and knowledge continuity so that critical areas are never dependent on a single person.

Requirements

12+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant time building and operating large-scale distributed systems or data platforms.
Deep expertise in distributed systems and data platform fundamentals, such as query processing, data integration/replication, change data capture, streaming or batch pipelines, concurrency, consistency, and fault tolerance.
Experience with Kubernetes-based services, multi-tenant SaaS architecture, and data security/governance (ACLs, encryption, data residency).
Demonstrated track record of leading architecture across multiple teams and delivering complex, cross-functional platform initiatives end to end.
Strong hands-on coding ability in at least one systems language (e.g., Java, C++, Go, Scala, or similar), with a continued practice of writing and reviewing production code.
Proven experience diagnosing and solving performance and scalability problems in production systems, using profiling, benchmarking, and observability data.
Ability to influence without authority – aligning engineers, managers, product, and partner teams around technical direction through clear written and verbal communication.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to Have

Experience with Trino internals, connector SPI, or other federated/distributed SQL query engines.
Experience with lakehouse and big-data technologies such as Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris, Spark, or Delta Lake.
Experience with Kafka or other event-streaming platforms, CDC, or message-driven integration frameworks.
Hands-on experience with cloud data warehouses and lakehouses (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift) and their JDBC/REST access patterns and authentication models (e.g., OAuth).
Experience with the ServiceNow platform (Glide), IntegrationHub, or Flow Designer.
Hands-on experience owning customer escalations or high-severity production incidents for enterprise software.
Familiarity with data quality, data observability, or AI-assisted data transformation.
Open-source contributions, patents, publications.

We Offer

Base pay of $171,900 - $300,800, 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.

Additional Information

Work Personas

We approach our distributed world of work with flexibility and trust. Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are categories that are assigned to ServiceNow employees depending on the nature of their work and their assigned work location. Learn more here. To determine eligibility for a work persona, ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow office using a third-party service.

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.

Sr Staff Software Engineer

Job description