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

Position location

• This is a flexible hybrid position requiring two days per week in a ServiceNow office.
• The description lists offices including San Francisco, Pleasanton, Santa Clara, San Diego, and Kirkland, Washington.
• The position supports US regulated markets.

Role overview

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate cloud-native platform components from design through production.
• Lead well-scoped projects, develop technical designs, and deliver features.
• Collaborate with senior, staff, and principal engineers on architecture and standards.
• Improve reliability, scalability, and operability through tests, instrumentation, runbooks, and on-call participation.
• Build operators, controllers, automation, and platform services for other teams.
• Onboard and mentor junior engineers through code review, design feedback, and pairing.

Qualifications

• Integrate AI into engineering work using tools, workflow automation, or other relevant approaches.
• Software development experience: 8+ years with a bachelor's degree, 5+ with a master's, 3+ with a PhD, or equivalent experience.
• At least 5 years building, deploying, and operating Kubernetes workloads.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP, including compute, networking, and IAM primitives.
• Track record delivering complex features or services as a key contributor.
• Working knowledge of containers, CI/CD, GitOps, and infrastructure as code.
• Strong Go or other systems-language programming skills and willingness to work primarily in Go.

Helpful experience

• Kubernetes controllers or the operator pattern.
• Container networking, CNI, or service mesh.
• Workload identity, mTLS, or secrets management.
• Observability involving metrics, tracing, and dashboards.
• Managed Kubernetes such as EKS, AKS, or GKE and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform.

Compensation

• The listed base pay range is USD 149,800–262,200; equity, variable or incentive compensation, and benefits may also apply.
• The description says pay varies with qualifications, skill level, competencies, and work location.

Federal screening and eligibility

• Employment is contingent on passing the USFedPASS background screening, including credit and criminal or misdemeanor checks and a drug test.
• Due to federal requirements, candidates must be U.S. citizens, naturalized U.S. citizens, or U.S. permanent residents holding a green card.