About the Position

Staff AI Native Engineer (Kubernetes)

Join ServiceNow as a Staff AI Native Engineer (Kubernetes) to lead the design and delivery of complex cloud-native components.

Responsibilities

Lead the design and delivery of complex components and services within the cloud-native platform, owning them from design through production operation.
Act as the technical lead for major features and initiatives within the team, translating ambiguous problems into clear, scalable, and executable designs.
Partner with Principal and Distinguished Engineers to ensure alignment with broader platform architecture, engineering standards, and long-term technical strategy.
Identify technical risks early and drive them to resolution, with a strong focus on reliability, scalability, operability, and engineering excellence.
Maintain a strong hands-on presence across the development lifecycle, including designing, coding, and reviewing core systems such as Kubernetes operators, controllers, infrastructure automation, and platform services.
Mentor mid-level and junior engineers while raising the engineering bar through code reviews, design reviews, technical guidance, and collaborative problem-solving.

Requirements

Core Skills:
- Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering and platform work.
- 8+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems and cloud-native platforms in production environments.
- Demonstrated experience building and operating Kubernetes platform infrastructure at scale.
- Hands-on developing Kubernetes Operators, Admission Controllers, or other platform extensions.
- Strong software engineering expertise in Go, with hands-on experience developing Kubernetes Operators, Controllers, Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), and platform automation capabilities.
- Deep understanding of Kubernetes architecture.
- Proven experience operating stateful and distributed workloads on Kubernetes.
- Experience with public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
- Strong background designing and building microservices, event-driven systems, and distributed application architectures.
- Hands-on experience with containers, CI/CD, GitOps practices, and Infrastructure-as-Code using tools such as Terraform, Crossplane, or equivalent technologies.
- Experience implementing observability and reliability best practices.
Secondary Skills:
- Experience with container networking (CNI) and/or service mesh.
- Experience with mTLS, workload identity, and secrets management at fleet scale.
- Experience with observability-metrics, tracing, and SLOs.
- Experience with Terraform, Crossplane, or similar declarative infrastructure tooling.
- Experience designing or tuning distributed data or compute workloads on Kubernetes.

Nice to Have

Experience with Apache Kafka (high-scale clusters, topic/partition strategies, HA).
Experience with Redis (high-scale clusters, HA).
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.

We Offer

Competitive salary
Opportunity to work in a leading AI control tower for business reinvention
Professional development opportunities
Collaborative and innovative work environment

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.

Staff AI Native Engineer (Kubernetes)

Job description