[Hiring] Sr Staff Software Engineer @ServiceNow

Role Description

Health Log Analytics (HLA) ingests, stores, and analyzes the logs that power ServiceNow's AIOps suite. We want it to be the data backbone teams trust to find problems early and fix them fast.

HLA is a data platform for operational logs at high volume, built for ServiceNow’s large enterprise customers. The work spans the full data path:

• Collection and ingestion
• Routing and enrichment
• Durable storage and retention
• Fast, cost-aware query

As data volume, customer needs, and AI-driven use cases grow, we need the platform to get more reliable, more efficient, and more useful.

We're looking for a senior technical leader to help set where HLA goes next. You'll work side by side with engineering and product leadership on the roadmap. You'll bring a clear point of view and show it with a prototype, not just a slide.

You'll set the technical bar for experienced engineers by being a great teammate, not the loudest person in the room.

Qualifications

• Experience in leveraging or critical thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision making, or problem solving.
• 12+ years building and operating production distributed systems, with substantial ownership of large-scale data or platform systems.
• Broad grounding across data ingestion, storage and query, and AI on top of data.
• Deep expertise in at least one area.
• Experience with ingest tools like Kafka, Pulsar, or Kinesis, and with columnar stores, time-series databases, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, or object-storage designs.
• A record of changing the direction of teams you didn't own, through credibility and clear thinking.
• Evidence-based judgment on AI.
• Good judgment on tradeoffs: consistency, latency, cost, and operational burden.
• Comfort with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Fluency in at least one of Go, Java, Scala, Rust, or Python.
• Clear communication skills.

Requirements

• Lead deep design reviews that raise the bar and leave people feeling sharper, not smaller.
• Define the reliability and efficiency bar for the HLA data path: completeness, durability, latency, availability, tenant isolation, and unit cost.
• Lead the technical approach to hard transitions, such as storage migrations, schema changes, replay, and upgrades with little or no downtime.
• Set clear architectural boundaries and contracts for the teams building collection, ingest, storage, anomaly detection, query, and AIOps experiences.
• Show how we build with AI. Weigh ideas against customer value, data quality, reliability, and cost.
• Run small experiments to help us decide what to scale.
• Set the example on quality, on-call, and learning from incidents.
• Mentor senior engineers and tech leads. Help grow the next technical leaders.
• Work as a real partner to engineering and product leadership. Learn in the open.

Benefits

• Base pay of $171,900 - $300,800, plus equity (when applicable), variable/incentive compensation, and benefits.
• Health plans, including flexible spending accounts.
• 401(k) Plan with company match.
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP).
• Matching donations.
• Flexible time away plan and family leave programs.