Director, Software Engineering - Observability - Monitoring & Alerting

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

ServiceNow is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead the development of our next-generation Observability solutions, supporting our global cloud services organization. In this highly technical and strategic leadership role, you will shape the vision and execution of observability for cloud-native systems at scale, enabling proactive insight, faster incident resolution, and enhanced customer experience.

You’ll lead a high-impact engineering organization responsible for delivering cohesive, intelligent observability solutions - including metrics, logs, traces, events - through self-serving & intuitive user experiences.

What you get to do in this role

• Define and execute the Observability vision, strategy, and roadmap, aligned with organizational reliability and performance goals.
• Lead, scale, and mentor a high-performing, cross-functional engineering team (including managers, engineers, and tech leads) & drive AI first development.
• Design, deliver, and operate both open source and 3rd party standards-based observability products across infrastructure, applications, and services.
• Implement AI/ML-powered observability for anomaly detection, predictive alerting, noise reduction, and root cause analysis.
• Develop self-service telemetry frameworks that empower developers to onboard services with best-in-class observability by default.
• Partner with SRE and Product teams to improve reliability, self-healing, and auto-remediation using observability insights.
• Influence system design through data-driven feedback loops to product and infrastructure teams.
• Define operational excellence KPIs, conduct postmortems, and continuously evolve the observability and performance review culture.
• Foster innovation and experimentation with emerging technologies (e.g., LLMs, AI Ops, Agentic workflows, eBPF, etc.).

Qualifications

To be successful in this role you have:

• 10+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems, cloud platforms, or infrastructure.
• 8+ years of engineering leadership experience managing & scaling high-performing teams and leaders.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience leading AI initiatives in engineering 
• Proven success in building and operating scalable observability & alerting solutions (based on logging, metrics, tracing, etc.) in production.
• Strong understanding of OpenTelemetry, TSDB(VictoriaMetrics/Prometheus) , Grafana, and other open observability tools.
• Strong understanding of Observability across the full stack - from frontend user interactions down to the infrastructure and networks supporting the system.
• Experience with cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes, and container observability.
• Demonstrated ability to define and execute strategies around SLOs, and incident lifecycle improvements.
• Outstanding communication and leadership skills with the ability to influence across all levels of the organization.
• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud observability is a plus.
• Passion for operational excellence, reliability engineering, and measurable outcomes.

GCS-23

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $217,500 - $380,700, 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