Principal / Distinguished Engineer

About the role

ServiceNow is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to provide organization-wide technical authority for our cloud-native platform. You will define the architectural standards for Kubernetes, distributed systems, and hyperscaler infrastructure while solving the most complex challenges in multi-cloud topology and control-plane design. This role operates at the intersection of platform strategy and execution, translating abstract product ambitions into concrete, scalable infrastructure blueprints. You will own the guardrails that enable thousands of engineers to build with speed, reliability, and security across global environments. The position demands comfort with ambiguity and the ability to drive technical direction through depth of insight rather than formal hierarchy. You will be the definitive voice on how we build and run our most critical infrastructure components.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Establish technical direction for cloud-native platforms across multiple engineering organizations, defining the canonical reference architecture for compute, storage, and networking.
• Address high-stakes technical problems including workload isolation, identity fabrics, and reliability at the scale of hundreds of clusters, ensuring resilience under extreme failure conditions.
• Partner with engineering fellows and senior leadership to drive architectural consistency and best practices, aligning platform evolution with long-term product strategies.
• Identify and mitigate technical risks for initiatives with C-suite visibility, including critical decisions on managed versus self-managed infrastructure and the associated tradeoffs.
• Design and build critical components such as operators, control planes, and infrastructure abstractions that abstract complexity and enable developer self-service.
• Mentor staff and principal engineers to develop the next generation of technical leadership, elevating the overall capability of the platform organization.
• Define and enforce standards for infrastructure-as-code, ensuring that all platform components are declarative, version-controlled, and reproducible across environments.
• Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies, determining their applicability and impact on the long-term viability of our cloud-native stack.
• Collaborate with security and compliance teams to embed governance and policy enforcement directly into the platform primitives and developer workflows.
• Drive the adoption of GitOps and automated delivery pipelines to accelerate release cycles while maintaining strict control and auditability.
• Architect solutions for multi-cluster management, optimizing for cost, performance, and operational simplicity across diverse hyperscaler landscapes.
• Lead post-incident reviews to extract systemic learnings and translate them into preventative controls, patterns, and tooling.
• Quantify the business impact of platform investments, demonstrating improvements in developer velocity, system reliability, and operational efficiency.
• Serve as a technical spokesperson for the platform, representing its capabilities and constraints to both internal and external stakeholders.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production, with a proven track record of delivering systems that withstand real-world load and failure.
• Deep expertise in operating Kubernetes at scale, including multi-cluster, multi-region, and multi-tenant environments, and a thorough understanding of the associated operational complexities and networking challenges.
• Authoritative experience with major hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and their managed Kubernetes offerings (EKS, AKS, GKE), including nuanced tradeoffs in networking, IAM, and service integrations.
• Proven ability to influence architecture and technical direction across multiple teams without relying on positional authority, leveraging deep expertise and clear communication to gain consensus.
• Strong programming skills in Go, with the ability to write idiomatic, production-grade code that integrates cleanly with existing platform components.
• Experience with AI integration in engineering, such as automating operational workflows or building agentic systems for fleet operations, demonstrating how intelligent automation can enhance platform operations.
• Deep knowledge of the operator pattern, infrastructure-as-code, control planes (e.g., Crossplane), GitOps, CNI, and service mesh, understanding the strengths, weaknesses, and interdependencies of these technologies.
• A history of delivering complex infrastructure platforms that adhere to security best practices, availability targets, and compliance requirements in regulated environments.

Nice to have

• Experience designing identity and trust fabrics (SPIFFE/SPIRE, mTLS), including the challenges of certificate lifecycle management at massive scale.
• Knowledge of multi-tenant workload isolation and runtime security (Kata Containers), and the implications for performance, security, and developer experience.
• Experience with regulated or federal market requirements (FedRAMP, air-gapped systems), and the adaptations necessary to support secure deployment in constrained environments.
• Expertise in large-scale observability, including metrics, tracing, and SLO-driven operations, and the use of telemetry to proactively manage platform health.
• A platform-as-product mindset with experience managing internal customer roadmaps and delivery pipelines, treating internal developers as customers to be served.

Practical notes

• Employment is contingent upon meeting export control regulations where applicable.
• For application assistance or reasonable accommodations, contact globaltalentss@servicenow.com.

About the company

It all started in sunny San Diego, California in 2004 when a visionary engineer, Fred Luddy, saw the potential to transform how we work. Fast forward to today - ServiceNow stands as a global market leader, bringing innovative AI-enhanced technology to over 8,100 customers, including 85% of the Fortune 500.