Senior Staff Platform Engineer - Federal

ServiceNow•Santa Clara, CA

1d•$181,200 - $317,100•Hybrid

About The Position

The Data Platform group builds highly scalable, high‑performance platform capabilities for data‑in‑motion and backend storage systems. Our customers operate at massive scale, pushing the boundaries of data volume, throughput, and concurrency. We are looking for a seasoned IC5 Senior Staff Engineer with deep expertise in distributed systems and Data Lake architectures to drive next‑generation platform innovation. As an IC5 Senior Staff Engineer, you will architect and deliver large‑scale distributed platform components, lead complex technical initiatives, and define engineering best practices. You will bring strong leadership, hands-on engineering depth, and the ability to design and operate reliable, scalable, and high‑performance data systems.

Requirements

Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering work — whether using AI-powered coding and operational tooling, automating workflows, or reasoning about how AI changes the way software and infrastructure are built.
12+ years of hands‑on engineering experience in distributed systems, data platforms, or large‑scale backend infrastructure with a Bachelor's degree; OR 8+ years with a Master's degree; OR 6+ years with a PhD OR equivalent work experience.
Strong fundamentals in distributed systems architecture, design patterns, and algorithms.
Deep programming expertise in Java, including JVM internals, memory models, and garbage collection.
Proven experience in JVM performance tuning, profiling, and diagnosing performance bottlenecks.
Deep programming expertise and hands-on experience working with Helm (charts authoring, templating, managing overlay layering across environments)
Strong understanding of concurrency, networking, sockets, OS internals, and performance optimization.
Hands-on experience building and operating large‑scale distributed systems.
Experience with relational databases such as Oracle, MySQL, or PostgreSQL.
Security systems, methods and protocols.
Experience with large‑scale deployments of distributed systems.
Deep knowledge of replication, fault-tolerant, and HA strategies.
Experience working in DevOps environments to operationalize distributed platforms.
GitOps and release engineering for distributed k8s-native services.
Strong expertise in designing and architecting platforms using: Kubernetes (workload deployments, upgrades, monitoring and maintenance).
Apache Iceberg (tables, catalogs, data encryption, schema evolution, metadata management).
Apache Kafka (high‑scale clusters, topic/partition strategies, HA).
Apache Flink (stateful stream processing, exactly‑once semantics).
Apache Spark (batch & streaming jobs, optimization, partitioning).
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.
Experience integrating Data Lakes with analytics engines, query services, or ML platforms.

Responsibilities

Architect, design, and build high‑performance distributed systems and platform components.
Build distributed systems data ingestion solutions with strong emphasis on scalability, quality, and operational excellence.
Deliver high‑quality, clean, modular, and reusable code while enforcing engineering best practices (code reviews, unit testing, automation, design reviews).
Build foundational libraries, frameworks, and tools focused on modularity, extensibility, configurability, and maintainability.
Collaborate across engineering teams to refine requirements and deliver end‑to‑end solutions.
Provide technical leadership for projects with significant complexity and risk.
Research, evaluate, and adopt new technologies that enhance platform capabilities.
Troubleshoot and diagnose complex production issues across distributed systems.