Senior Staff Platform Engineer - Kubernetes - Federal

ServiceNow•San Diego, CA

6d•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer with ServiceNow’s Data Platform organization, you will design, build, and operate features and services within a cloud-native platform. The position supports US Regulated Markets and requires passing the US Federal Personnel Authorization Screening Standards (USFedPASS), including credit, criminal/misdemeanor, and drug screening. Due to federal requirements, applicants 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. The role is primarily hands-on, building Kubernetes operators, controllers, automation, and platform services used by other teams. You will lead well-scoped team projects from requirements and initial ideas through technical design and delivery, collaborate with senior, staff, and principal engineers on platform architecture and standards, and contribute to reliability, scalability, and operability through testing, instrumentation, runbooks, and on-call participation. You will also help onboard and mentor junior engineers through code reviews, design feedback, and pairing.

Requirements

Experience leveraging or critically considering how to integrate AI into engineering work, such as AI-powered coding or operational tooling, workflow automation, or assessing AI’s effects on 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.
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 with 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 turning requirements and initial ideas into technical designs and delivering them.
Collaborate with senior, staff, and principal engineers to align work with platform architecture and standards.
Improve the reliability, scalability, and operability of platform services through testing, instrumentation, and runbooks.
Participate in on-call responsibilities.
Build Kubernetes operators, controllers, automation, and platform services used by other teams.
Help onboard and mentor junior engineers through code review, design feedback, and pairing.