Senior Staff Software Engineer - Data Platform - Kubernetes - Distributed Systems - Federal

Role overview

Workplace

• Flexible hybrid position requiring two days per week in a ServiceNow office. Listed office locations include Kirkland, Washington, and several California offices.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, delivery, and production operation of managed Postgres, queueing/streaming, and key-value/cache services across a global Kubernetes fleet.
• Turn ambiguous initiatives into executable designs with explicit availability, durability, and cost targets.
• Define high-availability, failover, disaster-recovery, and multi-region architecture and Kubernetes-native automation.
• Partner with engineering and product teams on architecture, standards, consumption contracts, tenancy models, and SLOs.
• Drive reliability and operability through risk resolution, failure-mode analysis, game days, and post-incident reviews.
• Design, code, and review core operators, controllers, automation, and platform services.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through reviews, feedback, and pairing.

Required qualifications

• 12+ years of software development with a bachelor’s degree, 8+ years with a master’s degree, 5+ years with a PhD, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years building production software and operating distributed systems and stateful Kubernetes workloads at scale.
• Led delivery of a broadly used shared multi-tenant infrastructure service, including its HA, failover, and operating model.
• Strong knowledge of availability, replication, consensus, recovery, durability, and RPO/RTO; strong system design across consistency, partitioning, capacity, and tenancy.
• Hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP; strong Kubernetes, containers, CI/CD/GitOps, and infrastructure-as-code knowledge.
• Strong Go skills, or systems-language skills with willingness to work primarily in Go.
• Experience leveraging or critically evaluating AI in engineering and platform work.

Helpful qualifications

• Experience building Kubernetes operators for stateful systems and deep expertise in Postgres, Kafka/NATS, or Redis/Valkey.
• Experience with multi-region data services, zero-downtime upgrades, observability and SLOs, capacity/cost management, or multi-tenancy.
• Experience with CNI/service mesh, workload identity, mTLS, secrets management, managed Kubernetes/data services, Terraform, or Crossplane.

Compensation

• Base pay is $149,800–$262,200 per year, plus equity where applicable, variable/incentive compensation, and benefits.
• Compensation varies with qualifications, skills, competencies, and work location.

Federal screening

• Employment is contingent on passing USFedPASS background screening, which includes credit and criminal/misdemeanor checks and a drug test.
• Federal requirements limit consideration to U.S. citizens, naturalized citizens, or U.S. permanent residents holding a green card.