Senior Staff Data Platform Engineer - Data Access Team
Job Description
Position Location:
This is a Flexible (Hybrid) position. Flexible positions require 2 days per week in a ServiceNow office location. We have offices in several locations, including San Francisco, CA; Pleasanton, CA; Santa Clara, CA; San Diego, CA; and Kirkland, WA
Are you energized by the power of enterprise-scale data to transform how we work? At ServiceNow, our mission is to “make the world of work, work better for people,” and our AI-driven platform is delivering on that promise. We're the #1 enterprise platform for uniting AI, data, and workflows — simplifying how people work, automating what slows them down, and enabling seamless, impactful experiences.
About the Role — Senior Staff Data Platform Software Engineer, Data Access Team
Every workflow, AI agent, and application on the ServiceNow AI Platform depends on one thing: getting the right data, fast, correctly, and securely. As part of the Persistence organization, you'll build the layer that makes that possible, the foundation under a platform that 85% of the Fortune 500 runs their business on.
You'll help:
• Give developers and customers faster, more reliable, more secure access to the data platform they build on
• Push the limits of IO, transactions, and concurrency across relational, time-series, and columnar engines
• Turn hard infrastructure problems into simple capabilities and automation for the developers and customers who build on the platform
About the Team
The Data Access team owns the ServiceNow ORM and data access layer. We take the platform's logical object model and translate every data request into high-performance queries against many database engines, including our homegrown RaptorDB (PostgreSQL), MariaDB, Oracle, and Trino, graph databases, and time-series databases. Our home-grown SQL generation engine, table management, and database metadata services are what let application developers build powerful applications across industries without ever having to manage engine complexity.
That makes us one of the most leveraged teams in the company. A single improvement to our engine speeds up thousands of applications and millions of queries, and getting it wrong is not an option.
As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you'll be a key technical leader in the Platform Persistence group. You'll set the architectural direction for the data access layer as it expands into new engines and AI-driven workloads, and raise the bar for engineering craftsmanship across the organization.
Why you'll love it here
• Problems that are hard: Query translation across heterogeneous engines, concurrency and locking at scale, and production issues that only show up at extreme volume.
• Impact you can measure: Your work touches every product on the platform.
• Real ownership: You'll set direction, write the design docs, and take features from idea to production, shaping the roadmap alongside product and engineering leadership.
• A team that likes the craft: We care about clean architecture, deep debugging, and mentoring each other, and we enjoy working through the gnarly problems together.
What you'll do
• Set the technical direction and architecture strategy for the data access layer, balancing long-term scalability with delivery
• Work on core data architecture that touches every part of the product, keeping it high-quality, reliable, secure, and fast
• Own features from design through delivery, turning business requirements into well-architected, cross-team solutions
• Lead design and code reviews, championing performance, maintainability, and testability across multiple teams
• Define comprehensive test strategies covering functional, regression, integration, and performance testing
• Diagnose and resolve the hardest production issues across the stack
• Mentor engineers at every level and raise the technical bar across the organization
To be successful:
• Having aptitude for learning new technologies quickly
• Demonstrated success completing complex, cross-team projects, on time and with quality
• Experience with troubleshooting difficult production issues e.g., memory leaks, concurrency issues, locking issues, network problems, intermittent failures etc. across the stack
• Track record of technical leadership — influencing architecture and engineering decisions across multiple teams without relying on direct authority
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including experience authoring design docs/RFCs and presenting technical strategy to senior engineering leadership
Requirements
Department: Engineering, Infrastructure and Operations
Function: Engineering
Experience Level: Not Applicable