Director - Database Performance Engineering

Company Description

It all started when engineer Fred Luddy wrote code that automated a tedious task for his coworker, Phyllis. She cried tears of joy. That moment inspired Fred to build a company that could do that for everyone—freeing people from busywork so they could focus on meaningful work. Today, ServiceNow is the AI control tower for business reinvention. Our ServiceNow AI platform brings together any AI, any data, and any workflow— helping 85% of the Fortune 500® work smarter, faster, and better. We're building an AI-native culture where technology and talent are unstoppable together. And we're just getting started.

Join us to put AI to work for people.

Job Description

What you get to do in this role:

Team Management: 

The successful candidate will lead the Database Performance Engineering organization responsible for driving performance, scalability, efficiency, and customer experience across ServiceNow's database platforms and supporting infrastructure. 

This leader will be responsible for building, developing, and scaling high-performing engineering teams focused on database performance, operating system performance, scalability engineering, performance testing, benchmarking, observability, capacity planning, workload optimization, and automation. Responsibilities include talent acquisition, performance management, career development, succession planning, objective setting, coaching, and prioritization of strategic initiatives. 

The role will establish a strong engineering-first culture centered on data-driven decision making, continuous improvement, performance excellence, and operational efficiency. 

This position is accountable for identifying and eliminating performance bottlenecks across database services, operating systems, compute, storage, infrastructure, and distributed application environments while ensuring the platform can scale to support future business and customer growth. 

The Director will partner closely with Product Engineering, Database Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, Architecture, and Operations teams to ensure performance and scalability considerations are incorporated throughout the software development lifecycle. 

The successful candidate will serve as the senior technical leader for complex performance investigations, customer-critical escalation engagements, migration readiness assessments, and platform scalability initiatives, transforming operational insights into long-term engineering improvements. 

They will influence architectural decisions and technology investments by providing performance expertise, scalability guidance, and production-based insights that improve platform efficiency and customer outcomes. 

Process and Procedures: 

The successful candidate will establish scalable performance engineering practices, standards, testing methodologies, and governance processes across the organization. 

They will drive adoption of performance testing and benchmarking frameworks, workload characterization methodologies, capacity planning models, observability standards, scalability assessments, and performance engineering best practices. 

This leader will continuously evaluate database, operating system, infrastructure, and application performance trends, identify systemic bottlenecks, and implement engineering improvements that increase efficiency, scalability, and customer satisfaction. 

The role will establish meaningful KPIs and engineering metrics that provide visibility into platform performance, workload growth, resource utilization, infrastructure efficiency, scalability risks, customer experience, and organizational effectiveness. 

The successful candidate will leverage AI-powered tools, analytics, automation frameworks, and production intelligence to accelerate performance analysis, identify emerging bottlenecks, optimize resource utilization, and improve engineering productivity. 

They will use performance testing results, production telemetry, customer escalations, and capacity forecasts to drive architectural improvements, migration readiness, scalability investments, and long-term platform evolution. 

The Director will champion a proactive performance engineering model that shifts the organization from reactive troubleshooting to predictive analysis, prevention, and continuous optimization.

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.

• 15+ years of experience in database engineering, performance engineering, di