Senior Database Engineer

ServiceNow•Santa Clara, CA

18h

About The Position

The Senior Database Engineer will join ServiceNow’s SWAT (Software Action Team), which ensures the production stability of customer applications and infrastructure services. The team provides operational support and serves as a last level of support for internal and external customers. The role is suited to a software engineer with a strong background in database technologies, performance analysis, and troubleshooting complex systems under dynamic, real-world loads. The engineer will learn the platform end to end and support its infrastructure in a fast-paced environment, with direct influence on the organization and its customers. The role includes on-call rotation responsibilities.

Requirements

Experience leveraging or critically considering how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving.
Five years of related experience with a bachelor's degree, or three years with a master's degree, or a PhD with no experience, or equivalent work experience.
At least five years of experience supporting or testing large-scale web-based distributed applications.
At least five years of experience with multiple relational databases, especially PostgreSQL.
Database experience including MVCC, transaction management, vacuum mechanics, database and query performance tuning, buffer management, WAL architecture, and backup and restore.
At least five years of hands-on experience working on a SaaS, PaaS, or cloud infrastructure product or solution.
Unix skills, including development, navigation, file manipulation, permissions, searching and finding files and text, and administrative actions.
Strong problem-solving and analytical skills, with an aptitude for learning new technologies.
Eagerness to learn everything about the ServiceNow platform.

Nice To Haves

Experience with the ServiceNow platform, scripting, tuning, and troubleshooting.
Basic shell scripting, Python, JavaScript, or Ansible skills.
Good understanding of schemas, tablespaces, indexing, and database performance optimization.
Familiarity or knowledge of CentOS or Red Hat operating systems.
Formal experience on a DevOps team (Kubernetes and CI/CD pipeline), performance team, or support team for a web-based application.

Responsibilities

Become a subject matter expert in production database troubleshooting, ServiceNow instance performance issues, and Linux performance analysis on premises and on hyperscalers.
Own complex incident root-cause analysis across multi-tenant PostgreSQL and MariaDB fleets at scale.
Develop observability and automation to prevent the recurrence of critical issues.
Influence infrastructure decisions that shape the multi-tenant cloud platform.
Mentor and collaborate with engineers across operations, support, and development.
Support infrastructure by learning the ServiceNow platform end to end.