layiq

/la·yiq/adjective

worthy; deserving; fitting; suitable.

A role, opportunity, or path that merits attention, time, and pursuit.

LAYIQ - Senior Staff Software Engineer (Kubernetes, Operators, CRD, Go) - Federal at ServiceNow

To be successful in this role you have: Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering and platform work — whether using AI-powered tooling, automating operational workflows, building agentic systems for fleet visibility and operations, or reasoning about AI’s impact on how infrastructure is built and run.
12+ years of software development experience with a Bachelor's degree; OR 8+ years with a Master's degree; OR 5+ years with a PhD; OR equivalent work experience.
8+ years building production software, with solid experience operating distributed systems and running stateful workloads on Kubernetes at scale.
A track record of leading the design and delivery of at least one shared, multi-tenant infrastructure service used broadly by other teams — a relational database service (Postgres or similar), a message queue or streaming platform (Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ, or similar), or a key-value/cache service (Redis/Valkey, etcd, or similar) — including its HA, failover, and operating model.
Deep understanding of high availability and failure handling: replication topologies, leader election, quorum and consensus, split-brain avoidance, backup/restore and point-in-time recovery, and designing to explicit RPO/RTO and durability targets.
Strong system design skills — you can reason rigorously about consistency models, partitioning and rebalancing, capacity planning, tenant isolation, and noisy-neighbor mitigation, and communicate the trade-offs clearly to engineers and stakeholders.
Hands-on experience with at least one major hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, GCP), including its core compute, networking, storage, and IAM primitives.
Strong working knowledge of containers and Kubernetes (including stateful primitives: StatefulSets, CSI/persistent storage, PDBs, topology spread), CI/CD and GitOps-based delivery, and infrastructure-as-code.
Strong programming skills in Go (or strong systems-language skills with a willingness to work primarily in Go).
It also helps if you have: Experience building or extending Kubernetes operators that manage stateful systems (e.g., CloudNativePG, Zalando/Crunchy Postgres operators, Strimzi, Redis/Valkey operators), and opinions on when to adopt versus build.
Deep expertise in one of the target systems: Postgres internals (WAL, streaming/logical replication, vacuum, connection pooling with PgBouncer/PgCat, major-version upgrades); Kafka/NATS (partitioning, ISR/replication, exactly-once semantics, consumer scaling); or Redis/Valkey (cluster mode, persistence, eviction, hot-key handling).
Experience running data services across multiple regions or clusters — cross-region replication, failover orchestration, and DR testing.
Experience with zero-downtime upgrades, schema/data migrations, and fleet-wide rollouts of stateful services.
Experience with observability and SLOs for stateful systems — replication lag, saturation, tail latency, error budgets — and with capacity and cost management for shared infrastructure.
Experience designing multi-tenancy: quotas, isolation, chargeback/showback, and self-service provisioning APIs or CRDs.
Experience with container networking (CNI) and/or service mesh, and with workload identity, mTLS, and secrets management as applied to data services.
Experience with managed Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE), managed data services (RDS/Aurora, Cloud SQL, MSK, ElastiCache), and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Crossplane.
For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $149,800 - $262,200
, 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 globaltalentss@servicenow.com 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.

Senior Staff Software Engineer (Kubernetes, Operators, CRD, Go) - Federal

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