Senior Database Engineer

About the role

Senior Database Engineer will design incident tracing strategies for distributed data fleets and guide platform evolution through rigorous observability. You will own complex incident root cause analysis across multi-tenant PostgreSQL and MariaDB environments at global scale. This role directly shapes infrastructure decisions and mentors cross-functional teams while building automation to prevent critical issues from recurring. You will operate under strict regulatory frameworks and adhere to Government of Canada reliability requirements. The position requires successful completion of a Government of Canada Reliability Status screening as a condition of employment. You will safeguard production stability for one of the world's largest enterprise platforms through proactive database management.

Key facts

What you'll do

Design intake paths for database alerts, defining how teams triage performance anomalies across cloud and on-premises environments.

Build observability tooling and automation to stop recurring incidents across multi-tenant database fleets.

Review complex incident analyses, tracing root causes across distributed queries and infrastructure layers with structured root cause analysis.

Ship fixes and safeguards that harden ServiceNow instance performance, coordinating with SRE and platform teams under reliability rules.

Partner with product and infrastructure groups, translating platform constraints into data strategies that guide multi-tenant roadmaps.

Operate provenance checks for database changes, validating configurations against security and compliance expectations before release.

Champion stress testing approaches that simulate realistic customer loads, using tooling to expose limits before users feel pain.

Implement monitoring frameworks that provide deep visibility into database health and query performance across global deployments.

Collaborate with engineering teams to optimize data access patterns and reduce contention in high-concurrency scenarios.

Lead post-incident reviews and translate findings into preventative measures for database infrastructure.

Drive standardization of database operations practices across distributed engineering organizations.

Evaluate emerging database technologies and propose integrations that enhance scalability and resilience.

Maintain detailed runbooks and operational procedures for database administration and recovery processes.

Act as a technical authority on database performance and reliability for the enterprise platform.

Requirements

You hold five or more years managing database performance and tuning complex schemas under concurrency and load.

You possess deep knowledge of MVCC, transaction management, vacuum mechanics, buffer management, WAL architecture, backup, and restore.

You have five or more years of experience supporting or testing large scale web-based distributed applications within Unix environments.

You have three or more years developing on a SaaS, PaaS, or Cloud Infrastructure product or solution.

You wield Unix skills for development, navigation, file manipulation, permissions, searching text, and administrative actions.

You solve hard problems with analytical thinking, quickly learning new technologies while communicating clearly to diverse stakeholders.

You develop and deploy mission critical software with care for stability and rollback paths.

You hold a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a comparable technical discipline, or bring equivalent work experience.

You clear Government of Canada Reliability Status screening, requiring Canadian citizenship or permanent resident status and five years of verifiable background history.

You maintain eligibility to obtain and maintain Reliability Status throughout your employment term.

You demonstrate consistent judgment in making decisions that impact system reliability and availability.

You apply structured approaches to incident investigation and problem resolution in production environments.

Nice to have

Experience integrating AI into workflows or analyzing AI-driven insights to influence database behavior and reliability is valued.

Formal experience on a DevOps, Performance, or support team supporting a web-based application is desired.

Demonstrated experience leading individual projects, including scheduling and reporting, is expected.

Practical notes

Employment is contingent upon successful completion and maintenance of the required Government of Canada Reliability Status screening.

Due to Government of Canada requirements, this role requires successful completion of a Government of Canada Reliability Status screening as a condition of employment.

The screening process requires five years of verifiable background history, including identity verification, education verification, a criminal record check, and a credit check.

Candidates must be eligible to obtain and maintain Reliability Status, which generally requires Canadian citizenship or Canadian permanent resident status.

Compensation details are provided as a guideline and are subject to change based on qualifications and work location.

Work personas may be flexible, remote, or required in office depending on role and location.

ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer.

Accommodations are available upon request for candidates with accessibility needs.

Export control regulations may apply to this position, requiring additional government approval for certain individuals.