Senior Staff Software Engineer – SRE, Release & Test Platforms, Santa Clara

Company 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.

Job Description

Join us to build the next generation of cloud-native reliability, release, and test platforms that enable engineering excellence, developer productivity, and high-confidence ServiceNow releases through automation, observability, and AI-driven operations.

What you get to do in this role:

Build and operate cloud-native engineering platforms for software validation, release qualification, and operational readiness.
Design production-like release and test environments that improve release confidence and deployment readiness.
Develop automated quality gates to assess release health, operational risk, and production readiness.
Integrate automated testing, observability, reliability signals, and deployment intelligence into CI/CD pipelines.
Build reusable test frameworks, self-service environments, test data, mock services, and developer productivity tooling.
Advance shift-left engineering through automated validation, continuous verification, and quality gates.
Automate failure detection, policy validation, deployment verification, security checks, and reliability assessments.
Lead Kubernetes-based platform evolution for scalable test infrastructure, release automation, and developer self-service.
Resolve recurring infrastructure issues through sustainable software, systems, and networking solutions.
Partner with engineering teams on design reviews, architecture standards, and automation-first reliability practices.

Qualifications

To be successful in this role you have:

Experience in leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving. This may include using AI-powered tools, automating workflows, analyzing AI-driven insights, or exploring AI's potential impact on the function or industry.
12+ years of experience in software, systems, platform, or reliability engineering with a Bachelor's degree; or 8 years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with 5 years experience; or equivalent experience.
Deep Kubernetes expertise across architecture, operations, networking, storage, security, autoscaling, and multi-cluster environments.
Experience building and operating large-scale Kubernetes platforms for cloud-native, mission-critical services.
Experience integrating Kubernetes with CI/CD, GitOps, automated testing, and deployment validation.
Experience designing cloud-native platforms for ephemeral environments, release qualifications, and automated validation.
Proven ability to lead engineering excellence across developer productivity, platform engineering, release confidence, and modernization.
Experience with progressive delivery, including canary releases, feature flags, automated rollback, and deployment verification.
Experience with chaos engineering, resilience validation, disaster recovery, and reliability assessments.
Expertise designing, authoring, testing, and debugging code in a team setting using languages such as Python, Go, Java, or Ruby.
Experience using AI-assisted engineering for intelligent testing, release risk analysis, incident diagnostics, and operational automation.
Strong coding, observability, SLO, and cross-team collaboration skills to improve reliability, performance, and engineering standards.

Good to have:

Expertise in observability and monitoring applications, services, and networks at scale.
Experience with DevOps automation, CI/CD pipelines, and agile methodologies, including GitLab CI/CD or similar tools.
Experience building enterprise-scale test automation frameworks such as Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, REST Assured, PyTest, JUnit/TestNG, or equivalent technologies.
Experience with test orchestration, test impact analysis, flaky test detection, parallel execution, and intelligent regression testing.
Experience with service virtualization, contract testing, synthetic testing, and test data management.
Experience building engineering platforms that support developer self-service and release engineering.
Experience with infrastructure configuration management tools such as Ansible.
Expertise with Kubernetes ecosystem technologies such as Helm, Argo CD, Argo Workflows, Kustomize, Istio/Linkerd, Gateway API/Ingress, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and container runtimes.
Experience implementing GitOps using Argo CD, Flux, or similar technologies.
Experience operating Kubernetes across AWS (EKS), Azure (AKS), and Google Cloud (GKE).

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $190,900 - $334,100, plus equity (when applicable), variable/incentive compensation and benefits. Sales positions generally offer a competitive On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive compensation structure. Please note that the base pay shown is a guideline, and individual total compensation will vary based on factors such as qualifications, skill level, competencies, and work location. We also offer health plans, including flexible spending accounts, a 401(k) Plan with company match, ESPP, matching donations, a flexible time away plan and family leave programs. Compensation is based on the geographic location in which the role is located and is subject to change based on work location.

Additional Information

Work Personas

We approach our distributed world of work with flexibility and trust. Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are categories that are assigned to ServiceNow employees depending on the nature of their work and their assigned work location. Learn more here. To determine eligibility for a work persona, ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow office using a third-party service.

Equal Opportunity Employer

ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or any other category protected by law. In addition, all qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with legal requirements.

Accommodations

We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are unable to use this online application and need an alternative method to apply, please contact [email protected] for assistance.

Export Control Regulations

For positions requiring access to controlled technology subject to export control regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (EAR), ServiceNow may be required to obtain export control approval from government authorities for certain individuals. All employment is contingent upon ServiceNow obtaining any export license or other approval that may be required by relevant export control authorities.