Senior Manager of Database Performance Engineering

• ServiceNow is seeking an experienced Sr Manager for our Database Engineering team
• This leader will drive engineering excellence across database performance, incident management, reliability engineering, observability, and capacity planning. The role requires deep technical expertise in PostgreSQL-based/equivalent architectures, large-scale distributed systems, and customer-facing production environments, combined with strong people leadership and operational rigor
• Define and execute the strategy for database performance, scalability, and efficiency across large-scale production environments
• Lead initiatives to improve query performance, reduce latency, optimize workload distribution, and eliminate systemic bottlenecks
• Establish performance benchmarks, tuning standards, and engineering best practices
• Partner with application, platform, and infrastructure teams to ensure performance considerations are incorporated into every stage of the software lifecycle
• Establish performance, reliability, and availability goals for critical database services
• Champion proactive monitoring, observability, and automation to improve operational health
• Lead the resolution of complex production issues and customer-critical escalations
• Drive deep root cause analysis and ensure sustainable corrective actions are implemented
• Partner with engineering leaders to shape RaptorDB platform strategy and architecture
• Build and develop a world-class team of performance and reliability engineers
• Team management, recruitment, career development, objective setting, projects prioritization and performance review
• Experience of managing an ‘on call’ team covering 24 x 7
• Drive a culture of intolerance of repetitive manual activities by promoting efforts towards automation, thus enabling scaling and removing in-efficiency
• Drive initiatives with partner teams to improve the reliability of the ServiceNow application and platform
• Act as part of the escalation crisis management team to orchestrate actions towards sustainable solutions
• Analysis and evaluation of existing processes to drive continuous improvement and efficiencies
• Provide training, documentation and support to partner teams that interface with SWAT
• Onboarding of new hires to enable their success in their roles
• Onboarding of new technologies, systems and automations into the team

Benefits

• Generous family leave
• Matched donations
• Annual learning stipends
• Flexible PTO
• Competitive retirement plan
• Paid volunteer time- The ideal candidate has experience leading high-performing engineering teams responsible for solving complex performance challenges, responding to critical customer escalations, and building sustainable solutions that improve platform resilience at scale
• You should have experience with large scale Web applications and MySQL/MariaDB environments and a knack for problem solving and optimization databases, application and performance issues. Qualified candidates will be responsible for leading a team of highly skilled engineers that push the limits of scalability
• Answer ‘yes’ to these questions and we want to hear from you. Hit the Apply button and let’s have a chat about the role and your skills and experiences
• Enjoy problem solving and an analytical mindset to help determine the reasons why things fail?
• Have a technical background in roles including DBA, systems/cloud engineering or DevOps?
• Have an attitude of continuous improvement and strive to remove in-efficient process?
• Know Linux operating systems and Databases to the level of troubleshooting and diagnostics?
• Have experience in leading a team of engineers and people management?
• Experience leading major incident response and customer-critical production escalations
• Knowledge of principles and methods involving ITIL
• Outstanding interpersonal skills and strong communication skills, both written and verbal
• Strong understanding of query optimization, execution planning, indexing strategies, replication, concurrency control, and workload management
• Experience working in software, platform and infrastructure delivered as a service
• 5+ years of engineering leadership experience managing high-performing technical teams
• Experience with large-scale SaaS or cloud-native platforms supporting enterprise customers
• 10+ years of experience in database engineering, performance engineering, site reliability engineering, or large-scale platform operations
• Uncompromising attention to detail
• Strong analytical, communication, and stakeholder management skills
• Deep expertise in PostgreSQL and distributed database architectures
• Bachelor’s degree in Computing Science or related technical field, or equivalent work experience
• Experience of using ServiceNow
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical strategy across multiple engineering organizations
• Experience building automation frameworks for operational excellence and incident reduction
• Experience operating PostgreSQL at hyperscale