Staff Software Engineer

Job description

It all started when engineer Fred Luddy wrote code that automated a tedious task for his coworker, Phyllis. She cried tears of joy. That moment inspired Fred to build a company that could do that for everyone—freeing people from busywork so they could focus on meaningful work. Today, ServiceNow is the AI control tower for business reinvention. Our ServiceNow AI platform brings together any AI, any data, and any workflow— helping 85% of the Fortune 500® work smarter, faster, and better. We're building an AI-native culture where technology and talent are unstoppable together. And we're just getting started. Join us to put AI to work for people.   About the role  We are hiring a staff software engineer (IC4) for the Telemetry Data Platform team, which carries product usage telemetry for the entire ServiceNow platform on a stack built with Kubernetes, Kafka, and ClickHouse. We are distributed across Israel, India, and the Americas.  This is a full stack role with its center of gravity firmly on the infrastructure side — expect roughly two-thirds of your time on telemetry infrastructure, data pipelines, Kubernetes and DevOps work, and the rest on the services and product surfaces on top. You will be equally comfortable designing a distributed system and owning it in production. If you like following a system from the event that fires to the chart that renders — and you want the pager for it — you will feel at home.  You will lead design and delivery of complex, multi-service features, own technical decisions within a domain, and are fully self-directed — escalating only genuine ambiguities and driving decisions to closure. Of the ten critical skills at this level, incident response management is the only one set at Expert; the rest are Experienced.  What you’ll do  Telemetry infrastructure and data pipelines  • Design, build, and own backend services for distributed data streaming and processing that handle high-volume, high-cardinality event data with predictable latency and no silent data loss.  • Build and maintain Kafka-based streaming pipelines and the pipeline components that feed ClickHouse.  • Own data modeling and query performance in ClickHouse — partitioning, sort keys, materialized views, retention, and the cost curve that comes with all of it.  • Partner with product and platform teams to shape requirements for telemetry ingestion and processing, then drive the solutions to production.  Kubernetes, DevOps, and production ownership  • Deploy, scale, and operate services in production Kubernetes environments, including Helm-based deployments and CI/CD pipelines that make releases repeatable and safe to roll back.  • Own observability for what you build — meaningful metrics, useful logs, real tracing, and alerts that fire on customer impact rather than on noise.  • Debug and resolve production incidents independently, participate in on-call, run root-cause analysis, and operate against defined service level objectives.  Full stack engineering and technical leadership  • Own the full development lifecycle for your work, and build the backend services and APIs that expose telemetry to internal consumers, product surfaces, and AI agents — including API contracts, data models, and schema migrations.  • Contribute to the analytics front end — dashboards, funnels, and exploration tools — with an eye on performance against large result sets, and improve the web and mobile capture SDKs.  • Lead the design of complex, multi-service features across team boundaries, drive decisions to closure, and write the design docs and postmortems that outlive the conversation.  • Raise the bar through code review, test strategy, and automation coverage, and mentor engineers on the team.  Experience and education requirements  The job profile defines IC4 by scope, independence, and impact rather than years served. The minimums below are the screening bar for this requisition.  Requirement  Mandatory minimum  8+ years of Backend software engineering experience  4+ years of Designing and operating distributed systems  3+ years Kubernetes in production, including Helm and CI/CD  3+ years Kafka or equivalent streaming and data pipelines  3+ years On-call and production ownership  Bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering, or a closely related technical field  Required  A master’s degree may offset up to one year of the experience minimum. Equivalent practical experience is considered where technical depth is clearly demonstrable.  Required qualifications  • Strong backend development experience in Java, Python, Go or equivalent, used in production at scale.  • Hands-on experience building distributed systems for data streaming, processing, and storage.  • Production experience deploying and managing services on Kubernetes, including Helm and CI/CD pipelines.  • Working knowledge of Kafka or an equivalent messaging and streaming system.   • Solid SQL skills and hands-on experience with a columnar or analytical data store, including query optimization and physical data modeling.  • Demonstrated depth in incident responseand customer escalations  • Enough front-end capability to build and debug a data-heavy interface: