Senior Staff Data Platform Engineer (Data Access Team)

• The engineering organization is a dynamic group of builders, thinkers, and problem-solvers dedicated to delivering scalable, AI-powered software products that elevate how organizations work. We value clean architecture, intuitive user experiences, and a culture of continuous improvement. Every engineer here plays a key role in shaping the quality and reliability of our products
• As part of the Persistence organization, you’ll be building the backbone of the ServiceNow AI Platform — the system that powers reliability, scale, and intelligent transformation. You will help:
• Innovate to bring better (quality, performant, scalable, secure) access to our data platform that internal and external customers build upon
• Push IO, transaction, and concurrency limits across relational, time-series, and columnar stores
• Innovate to bring more capability to developers and automation to end customers
• The Data Access team is responsible for translating customers’ data requests from the ServiceNow platform and accurately querying the database using our home-grown SQL generation engine. This team is responsible for SQL generation into Trino, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and Oracle databases, as well as table management and database metadata
• As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Data Platform team, you will be a key technical leader within the Platform Persistence group, setting direction for the team’s architecture and raising the bar for engineering craftsmanship across the organization
• You’ll work on top of core data architecture that touches every part of our product, ensuring our systems maintain quality, reliability, security and performance
• Be a master at managing and enhancing a complex codebase with quality and speed
• Deliver projects on time and with quality, with other engineers in tow
• Set technical direction and architecture strategy for the Data Access team’s systems, ensuring long-term scalability and maintainability
• Collaborate with product managers and engineering leadership to translate business requirements into well-architected, cross-team technical solutions, owning features from design through delivery
• Drive design and code reviews, championing best practices in performance, maintainability, and testability across multiple teams
• Develop and advocate for comprehensive test strategies covering functional, regression, integration, and performance aspects
• Foster a culture of continuous learning and engineering excellence, sharing best practices in engineering and quality across the broader organization
• Having aptitude for learning new technologies quickly
• Developing platform technologies at scale
• Relational Database Experience: Developing on, troubleshooting, and optimizing performance
• Mentor junior, senior, and staff-level engineers to help them thrive in a complex codebase, raising the technical bar across the team

Benefits

• Generous family leave
• Matched donations
• Annual learning stipends
• Flexible PTO
• Competitive retirement plan
• Paid volunteer time- Experience with troubleshooting difficult production issues e.g., memory leaks, concurrency issues, locking issues, network problems, intermittent failures etc. across the stack
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including experience authoring design docs/RFCs and presenting technical strategy to senior engineering leadership
• Demonstrated success completing complex, cross-team projects, on time and with quality
• Track record of technical leadership — influencing architecture and engineering decisions across multiple teams without relying on direct authority
• Having aptitude for learning new technologies quickly
• Expert-level understanding of best practices for object-oriented and modularized software, with emphasis on Java
• Experience with automated testing frameworks (e.g., JUnit, Selenium, TestNG) and integrating tests into CI/CD pipelines
• 10+ years of software development experience with a Bachelor’s degree; OR 8+ years with a Master’s degree; OR 6+ years with a PhD OR equivalent work experience
• Good understanding of cloud-based and distributed systems
• Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering work — whether using AI-powered coding and operational tooling, automating workflows, or reasoning about how AI changes the way software and infrastructure are built
• Expert level with core Java development
• Knowledge and/or experience with relational databases: PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, MariaDB, MS SQL Server, Trino, etc
• Advanced-Expert level of backend platform development
• Demonstrated track record of technical leadership at a Staff or Senior Staff level (or equivalent)
• Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, design patterns, and performance optimization at scale
• Deep understanding of software quality principles including reliability, observability, and production readiness
• Experience leveraging critical thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving — including AI-powered tools, automating workflows, or analyzing AI-driven insights
• Familiarity with RDBMS internals
• Familiarity with ServiceNow platform is a plus
• Experience working in a DevOps environment
• Passionate about database technologies
• Experience with Unix shell
• Experience working in a customer-focused environment