Senior Staff Systems Engineer

It all started in sunny San Diego, California in 2004 when a visionary engineer, Fred Luddy, saw the potential to transform how we work. Fast forward to today — ServiceNow stands as a global market leader, bringing innovative AI-enhanced technology to over 8,100 customers, including 85% of the Fortune 500. Our intelligent cloud-based platform seamlessly connects people, systems, and processes to empower organizations to find smarter, faster, and better ways to work. But this is just the beginning of our journey. Join us as we pursue our purpose to make the world work better for everyone.

 What you get to do in this role:

• Software Development
  
  ◦ Design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, and improve software in Go and Python.
  
  ◦ Build scalable, reliable backend services/APIs/microservices with clear SLAs and contracts.
  
  • Code Quality & Standards
  
  ◦ Ship clean, well-documented, maintainable code with unit/integration tests by default.
  
  ◦ Participate in design/code reviews; enforce linters, static analysis, and style guides.
  
  • Systems Design & Architecture
  
  ◦ Design fault-tolerant, high-throughput systems: concurrency models, performance tuning, caching, data partitioning.
  
  ◦ Integrate with relational/NoSQL stores, streams/queues, and cloud-native services.
  
  • Troubleshooting & Reliability
  
  ◦ Diagnose and resolve production issues across service/network/data layers to reduce MTTR.
  
  ◦ Instrument with Prometheus/OpenTelemetry/Grafana; define actionable alerts tied to SLOs.
  
  • Collaboration & Delivery
  
  ◦ Partner with Product, QA, and engineers to shape requirements and deliver iteratively in Agile.
  
  ◦ Author crisp design docs/ADRs and runbooks; provide thoughtful PR reviews and mentorship.
  
  • Cloud Integration
  
  ◦ Design solutions on AWS/Azure/GCP (compute, storage, networking, IAM) with the right managed services.
  
  ◦ Build with Docker/containerd and operate Kubernetes (ingress, autoscaling, secrets, config).
  
  • CI/CD & Automation
  
  ◦ Automate build/test/release (GitHub Actions/GitLab/Jenkins) with canary/blue-green and safe rollbacks.
  
  ◦ Codify infra with Terraform (modules/workspaces) and adopt GitOps (Argo CD/Flux).
  
  ◦ Create internal CLIs/SDKs and scripts (Go/Python/shell) to remove toil and speed dev workflows.
  
  • Security & Compliance
  
  ◦ Implement OAuth2/OIDC/JWT, manage secrets (AWS Secrets Manager / Azure Key Vault / GCP Secret Manager), enforce least-privilege IAM.
  
  ◦ Bake in security checks (SAST/DAST, dependency scanning, SBOM/signing) and follow CIS/benchmarks.
  
  • AI & Intelligent Automation
  
  ◦ Accelerate engineering with AI (tests, scaffolding, code review) using curated prompts/guardrails.
  
  ◦ Deliver AI/RAG features and embed AI in ops (log/alert triage, ChatOps);
  
  ◦ Ensure quality/safety/cost via eval sets, telemetry & token tracking, and PII-safe redaction/rate limits.

To be successful in this role you have:

8-10+ years building/operating high-scale backend APIs and platforms with end-to-end ownership.

• Go expertise: idiomatic design; goroutines/channels; context/timeouts; sync patterns; memory/GC tuning; pprof/benchmarks; race detector; generics; clean error handling.

• API design & productization: REST/gRPC; OpenAPI/Protobuf; versioning; pagination/filtering; partial responses; idempotency keys; retries/backoff; circuit breakers; rate limiting/quotas; SDK generation; deprecation strategy.

• Data & caching: PostgreSQL/MySQL schema design, migrations, transactions, pooling, replicas; Redis (cache-aside/write-through), locks, TTLs; messaging with Kafka/SQS/Pub/Sub, DLQs, "exactly-once-ish" via idempotency.

• Reliability & observability: structured logs (slog/zap), request/correlation IDs, OpenTelemetry traces/metrics/logs, dashboards & SLOs/error budgets; feature flags; blue-green/canary; chaos/soak tests.

• API security: OAuth2/OIDC/JWT, mTLS, RBAC/ABAC, input validation, OWASP API best practices; secrets via Secrets Manager/Key Vault/Secret Manager; KMS and audit logging.

• Kubernetes ops: EKS/AKS/GKE; cluster upgrades; HPA/VPA; PDBs; network policies; ingress/gateways; storage classes.

• Cloud depth: Strong in one (AWS/Azure/GCP) with working knowledge of the others.

• CI/CD & supply chain: GitHub Actions/GitLab/Jenkins; multi-stage pipelines; contract/integration tests; k6/Vegeta load tests; linters/static analysis; SBOM & cosign; admission controls/policy-as-code.

• Communication & leadership: clear design docs/ADRs, constructive reviews, mentorship, crisp incident comms.

• AIOps : pragmatic use of embeddings/vector stores and RAG for runbooks/KB, with evals, cost/latency tracking, and PII-safe guardrails.

JV20

Work Personas

We approach our distributed world of work with flexibility and trust. Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are categories that are assigned to ServiceNow employees depending on the nature of their work and their assigned work location. Learn more here. To determine eligibility for a work persona, ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow office using a third-party service.

Equal Opportunity Employer

ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin or nationality, ancestry, age, disability, gender identity or expression, marital status, veteran status, or any other category protected by law. In addition, all qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with legal requirements. 

Accommodations

We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are unable to use this online application and need an alternative method to apply, please contact [email protected] for assistance. 

Export Control Regulations

For positions requiring access to controlled technology subject to export control regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (EAR), ServiceNow may be required to obtain export control approval from government authorities for certain individuals. All employment is contingent upon ServiceNow obtaining any export license or other approval that may be required by relevant export control authorities. 

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