Senior Software Engineer - Data Platform - Kubernetes - Distributed Systems at ServiceNow
San Diego, CA
$128,900–$219,100from the description
Aug 10, 2026
San Diego, CA
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A Senior Software Engineer role on ServiceNow's Data Platform team, focused on designing, building, and operating cloud-native platform services and automation tooling that other engineering teams depend on. The work is primarily hands-on — writing production Go code, deploying workloads on Kubernetes, and contributing to reliability through testing, instrumentation, and on-call participation. Suits an experienced engineer comfortable owning features end-to-end in a cloud infrastructure context.
Senior level · 5+ years · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 5 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 680 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 510–890
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $217,796 (middle half $177,469–$231,052). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 12, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The role lists multiple California office locations (San Francisco, Pleasanton, Santa Clara, San Diego) plus Kirkland, WA as possible hybrid work sites; Santa Clara/San Jose metro is used as the primary CBSA given the Data Platform team context, but the actual work location may vary.
The degree requirement is effectively None: the JD explicitly accepts equivalent work experience in lieu of any degree.
The overall years minimum of 5 reflects the primary path ('5+ years with a Bachelor's'); the JD also accepts 3+ years with a Master's or a PhD with no experience.
Go is listed as the primary required language, but the JD accepts another systems language 'with a willingness to work primarily in Go' — it is treated as a hard gate on the capability, with Go as the expected tool.
The alt SOC (15-1244) is noted because the role has meaningful infrastructure/operations scope (Kubernetes, cloud primitives, on-call), but the primary emphasis on writing production software and building platform services makes 15-1252 the stronger fit.
'Observability' is listed under the 'It also helps if you have' (preferred) section and covers metrics, logging, and dashboards without naming a specific tool.
DNS, TLS, and IAM are mentioned under the preferred section as networking/security fundamentals — these are concepts rather than named tools and are omitted from the skills list per extraction rules.
Read the full posting
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