Senior Software Engineer – Compute Engineering

ServiceNow•Santa Clara, CA

About The Position

The Senior Software Engineer will join ServiceNow’s Compute Engineering organization, which builds scheduling, capacity, and performance systems for the company’s platform across private and public clouds. The position involves developing software-defined, declarative compute infrastructure and improving scheduling and resource-management systems. The role also contributes to capacity tooling, performance testing, reliability, and integration with related engineering teams. The posting is hiring across multiple engineering levels. Final level alignment depends on experience, technical expertise, demonstrated impact, and interview performance. At the Senior level, the engineer delivers well-defined features and components with guidance, independently writes, tests, and debugs code within a system, and takes work through to production. Staff-level expectations include owning a component or feature area end to end, leading design discussions, mentoring engineers, and identifying risks.

Requirements

Experience leveraging or critically considering how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving.
At least 5 years of related software engineering, cloud, or infrastructure automation experience with a bachelor's degree; or at least 3 years with a master's degree; or a PhD with relevant research or industry experience; or equivalent experience.
Strong programming skills in Python, Go, or Java, with experience in related languages.
Experience building and maintaining Linux-based systems using infrastructure-as-code and configuration management tools such as Terraform and Ansible.
Comfort with virtualization and cloud infrastructure across private and public clouds, such as Azure, AWS, or GCP.
Working understanding of IP networking, block and file storage, and load balancers.
Working understanding of internet protocols such as DNS, NTP, and HTTP.
Ability to work independently across interconnected systems and investigate root causes without waiting for direction.
A learning mindset and motivation to build new skills and deliver improvements to internal and external customers.
Excellent oral and written communication skills.
Integrity, honesty, and commitment to ServiceNow’s values.
At Staff level, experience driving architectural discussions and influencing technical decisions.
At Staff level, experience leading the end-to-end design and delivery of a component or feature area.
At Staff level, experience mentoring engineers and supporting their technical growth.

Nice To Haves

Experience with capacity planning, performance testing, or load testing.
Experience with Kubernetes, Slurm, or other large-scale schedulers or resource managers.
Experience with ML-driven scheduling, forecasting, or capacity optimization.
Experience with release management and large-scale server infrastructure.

Responsibilities

Write and maintain software-defined, declarative infrastructure for compute at scale, with build systems, services, and automation that are specified, documented, and testable.
Build and improve compute scheduler and resource-management components, including placement, prioritization, and preemption.
Build tools for capacity data collection, forecasting, and reporting across private and public clouds.
Write performance and load tests and help detect regressions in scheduling latency and throughput.
Research and adopt open-source and commercial tools and methods that improve compute efficiency and reliability.
Collaborate with networking, orchestration, and SRE teams on integration and design.
Participate in design reviews and on-call rotations, and contribute to post-incident improvements.
Use AI tools to speed up development and analysis, and help identify opportunities for ML to improve capacity or placement decisions.
At Staff level, drive architectural discussions and influence technical decisions to simplify and streamline infrastructure.
At Staff level, lead the design and delivery of a component or feature area end to end and mentor engineers.