Senior Software Engineer – Compute Engineering

ServiceNow · Santa Clara, CALIFORNIA, United States

  • Senior
  • Full-time
  • $143,200 – $243,400
  • Posted 2026-10-29
  • Confirmed live on 29 October 2026

Apply at ServiceNow

Job description

Job Description
We are hiring across multiple engineering levels. Final level alignment is determined by experience, technical expertise, demonstrated impact, and interview performance.
Join the Compute Engineering organization, which builds the scheduling, capacity, and performance systems that run our platform across private and public cloud.
What you get to do in this role:

• Write and maintain software-defined, declarative infrastructure for compute at scale, with build systems, services, and automation that are specified, documented, and testable.

• Build and improve components of the compute scheduler and resource-management systems, including placement, prioritization, and preemption.

• Build tools for capacity data collection, forecasting, and reporting across private and public cloud.

• Write performance and load tests, and help detect regressions in scheduling latency and throughput.

• Research and adopt open-source and commercial tools and methods that improve compute efficiency and reliability.

• Collaborate with networking, orchestration, and SRE teams on integration and design.

• Take part in design reviews and on-call rotations, and contribute to post-incident improvements.

• Use AI tools to speed up development and analysis, and help identify where ML can improve capacity or placement decisions.
Level expectations

• Senior Level : Delivers well-defined features and components with guidance. Writes, tests, and debugs code independently within a system, and takes their work through to production.

• Staff Level : Owns a component or feature area end to end, including scoping and design. Leads design discussions for a team, mentors IC3 engineers, and identifies risks before they become incidents.

Qualifications
To be successful in this role you have:

• Experience in leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving. This may include using AI-powered tools, automating workflows, analyzing AI-driven insights, or exploring AI's potential impact on the function or industry.

• 5+ years of related experience in software engineering, cloud, or infrastructure automation with a Bachelor's degree; or 3+ years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with relevant research or industry experience; or equivalent experience.

• Strong programming skills in Python, Go, or Java, with experience in related languages.

• Experience building and maintaining Linux-based systems through infrastructure-as-code and configuration management tools, such as Terraform and Ansible.

• Comfortable with virtualization and cloud infrastructure across private and public clouds, such as Azure, AWS, GCP.

• Working understanding of IP networking, block and file storage, and load balancers.

• Working understanding of internet protocols such as DNS, NTP, and HTTP.

• Works independently across interconnected systems and investigates root causes without waiting for direction.

• Experience integrating AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem solving.

• Has a learning mindset and is motivated to build new skills and bring real improvement to internal and external customers.

• Is an excellent oral and written communicator.

• Has integrity and honesty, and upholds ServiceNow's values.
Staff Level additionally

• Drives architectural discussions and influences technical decisions to simplify and streamline infrastructure.

• Has led the design and delivery of a component or feature area end to end.

• Has mentored engineers and helped them grow technically.
Preferred

• Experience with capacity planning, performance testing, or load testing.

• Experience with Kubernetes, Slurm, or other large-scale schedulers or resource managers.

• Experience with ML-driven scheduling, forecasting, or capacity optimization.

• Experience with release management and large-scale server infrastructure.

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $143,200 - $243,400, plus equity (when applicable), variable/incentive compensation and benefits. Sales positions generally offer a competitive On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive compensation structure. Please note that the base pay shown is a guideline, and individual total compensation will vary based on factors such as qualifications, skill level, competencies, and work location. We also offer health plans, including flexible spending accounts, a 401(k) Plan with company match, ESPP, matching donations, a flexible time away plan and family leave programs. Compensation is based on the geographic location in which the role is located and is subject to change based on work location.

Additional Information
Work Personas
We approach our distributed world of work with flexibility and trust. Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are categories that are assigned to ServiceNow employees depending on the nature of their work and their assigned work location. L

Interview problems reported for ServiceNow

Reported by candidates and public write-ups, not by ServiceNow. Practise each one here:

More at ServiceNow

More like this

All open software jobs