Senior Staff Software Engineer - Backend (Persistence)

Company Description

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®. Our intelligent cloud-based platform seamlessly connects people, systems, and processes to empower organizations to find smarter, faster, and better ways to work. But this is just the beginning of our journey. Join us as we pursue our purpose to make the world work better for everyone.

Job Description

About the Team: 

The engineering organization is a dynamic group of builders, thinkers, and problem-solvers dedicated to delivering scalable, AI-powered software products that elevate how organizations work. We value clean architecture, intuitive user experiences, and a culture of continuous improvement. Every engineer here plays a key role in shaping the quality and reliability of our products.  

About the Role – Staff Data Platform Software Engineer, Graph API Team 

As part of the Persistence organization, you’ll be building the backbone of the ServiceNow AI Platform — the system that powers reliability, scale, and intelligent transformation. You will help: 

• Innovate to bring better (quality, performant, scalable, secure) access to our data platform that internal and external customers build upon 
• Enable Cypher-like query capabilities on relational domains (like CMDB), supporting deep analytics and insight 
• Push IO, transaction, and concurrency limits across relational, time-series, and columnar stores 
• Innovate to bring more capability to developers and automation to end customers 

The Graph API team is part of the Data Access team, responsible for translating customers’ data requests from the ServiceNow platform and accurately querying the database using our home-grown SQL generation engine. This team is responsible for SQL generation into PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and Oracle databases, as well as table management and database metadata.  

What you get to do in this role: 

• You’ll work on top of core data architecture that touches every part of our product, ensuring our systems maintain quality, reliability, security and performance. Design and develop scalable, maintainable, and reusable software components with a strong emphasis on performance and reliability. 
• Collaborate with product managers to translate requirements into well-architected solutions, owning features from design through delivery 
• Build intuitive and extensible user experiences using modern UI frameworks, ensuring flexibility for customer-specific needs. 
• Contribute to the design and implementation of new products and features while enhancing existing product capabilities.  
• Integrate automated testing into development workflows to ensure consistent quality across releases. 
• Participate in design and code reviews ensuring best practices in performance, maintainability, and testability.  
• Develop comprehensive test strategies covering functional, regression, integration and performance aspects 
• Foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement by sharing best practices in engineering and quality  
• Promote a culture of engineering craftsmanship, knowledge-sharing, and thoughtful quality practices across the team. 

Qualifications

Required: 

• 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. 
• Typically requires a minimum of 12 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 8 years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with 5 years experience; or equivalent experience.
• Experience In using AI Productivity tools such as Windsurf, Cursor, etc is a plus or nice to have. 
• 6+ years of hands-on backend development with experience in Java. 
• Experience with modern front-end frameworks such as Angular, React, or Vue. 
• Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, design patterns, and performance optimization  
• Familiarity with automated testing frameworks (e.g., JUnit, Selenium, TestNG) and integrating tests into CI/CD pipelines 
• Understanding software quality principles including reliability, observability, and production readiness. 
• Ability to troubleshoot complex systems and optimize performance across the stack. 
• Experience with AI-powered tools or workflows, including validation of datasets, model predictions, and inference consistency. 
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