Senior Staff Platform Engineer - Kubernetes - Federal

ServiceNow•San Diego, CA

7d•$171,900 - $300,800•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer with ServiceNow’s Data Platform organization, you will design and implement features and services within its cloud-native platform. The position supports US Regulated Markets and requires passing the USFedPASS federal personnel authorization screening, including credit, criminal/misdemeanor, and drug screening. Due to federal requirements, candidates must be US citizens, naturalized US citizens, or US permanent residents holding a green card. This is a flexible hybrid position requiring two days per week in a ServiceNow office. Listed office locations include San Francisco, Pleasanton, Santa Clara, and San Diego, California, and Kirkland, Washington. You will work hands-on building platform components such as Kubernetes operators, controllers, automation, and services that other teams depend on. The role includes leading well-scoped team projects, collaborating with senior, staff, and principal engineers, and helping onboard and mentor junior engineers. The position offers a base pay range of $171,900–$300,800, plus equity when applicable, variable/incentive compensation, and benefits. Individual total compensation varies according to qualifications, skills, competencies, and work location.

Requirements

Experience leveraging or critically considering how to integrate AI into engineering work, such as through AI-powered coding or operational tooling, workflow automation, or applying AI to software and infrastructure development.
12 or more years of software development experience with a bachelor’s degree; or 8 or more years with a master’s degree; or 5 or more years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
At least 5 years of hands-on experience building, deploying, and operating workloads on Kubernetes.
Working experience with at least one major hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including core compute, networking, and IAM primitives.
A track record of delivering complex features or services as a key contributor.
Solid working knowledge of containers, CI/CD, GitOps-based delivery, and infrastructure-as-code.
Strong programming skills in Go, or another systems language and willingness to work primarily in Go.
Must pass ServiceNow’s USFedPASS background screening, including credit, criminal/misdemeanor, and drug checks.
Must be a US citizen, naturalized US citizen, or US permanent resident holding a green card.

Nice To Haves

Experience building Kubernetes controllers or working with the operator pattern.
Familiarity with container networking (CNI) or service mesh.
Experience with workload identity, mTLS, or secrets management.
Experience with observability, including metrics, tracing, and dashboards.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate cloud-native platform components and services, taking features from design through production.
Lead well-scoped team projects by translating requirements and initial ideas into technical designs and delivering the work.
Collaborate with senior, staff, and principal engineers to align work with platform architecture and standards.
Contribute to reliability, scalability, and operability by writing tests and instrumentation, improving runbooks, and participating in on-call.
Build operators, controllers, automation, and platform services used by other teams.
Help onboard and mentor junior engineers through code reviews, design feedback, and pairing.