Senior Staff Platform Engineer, ServiceNow
Federal
$181.2-317.1k
+ Equity (when applicable) + Variable/incentive compensation
More information about location
2 days a week in office (San Francisco, CA; Pleasanton, CA; Santa Clara, CA)
Cloud-based digital workflows for enterprises
Be an early applicant
Cloud-based digital workflows for enterprises
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$181.2-317.1k
+ Equity (when applicable) + Variable/incentive compensation
More information about location
2 days a week in office (San Francisco, CA; Pleasanton, CA; Santa Clara, CA)
1001+ employees
Company mission
To transform IT to revolutionize the enterprise.
Role
Who you are
- You will bring strong leadership, hands-on engineering depth, and the ability to design and operate reliable, scalable, and high‑performance data systems
- 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
- Core Engineering Expertise
- 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
- Distributed Systems Expertise
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
Our take
ServiceNow provides cloud-based solutions that define, structure, manage, and automate services for enterprise operations, transforming old, manual ways of working into modern digital workflows. The company was founded in 2004 with a vision to build a cloud-based platform that would enable regular people to route work effectively through the enterprise.
Much as Salesforce enables a company to manage its external clients by keeping a record of all contacts and interactions, ServiceNow promises an internal system to meet the needs of employees. It has succeeded in claiming half the market, setting itself apart from legacy IT service-management software players like BMC Software, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cherwell Software and CA Technologies.
The company's success comes from two product traits: simplicity and customisability. ServiceNow's IT tools don't require the IT department to set them up. Once running, they offer a single collection centre for requests, data points and checklists, all of which can in turn be analysed by algorithms to predict needs, flag concerns and measure efficiency.
The company has more than 7,700 customers, including 85% of the Fortune 500 list of the United States' largest corporations. ServiceNow now looks to increase its revenue threefold in the upcoming years and has entered into a 5-year partnership plan with Visa, beginning with the launch of a Visa-integrated dispute resolution solution for issuers. The company is prioritising organic growth over mergers and acquisitions, with a target revenue of $15B, something which its Visa partnership will no doubt aid in achieving.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
16% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Mar 2012
$11m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Feb 2012
$17.9m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Total funding: $83.8m
Company benefits
- Generous family leave
- Matched donations
- Annual learning stipends
- Flexible PTO
- Competitive retirement plan
- Paid volunteer time
Company HQ
Santa Clara, CA
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