Senior Software Engineering Manager - FinOps Platform Services

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.

What you get to do in this role:

Platform Ownership & Operations 

• Own the operational health and reliability of Trino, Lightdash, Coder, Jupyter, Redash, Hive Metastore, and Nessie across development and production environments. 

• Establish and maintain SLOs for platform availability, query performance, and workspace provisioning. Build the dashboards and alerting to track them. 

• Own Trino cluster operations end to end, including deployment, scaling, upgrades, performance tuning, resource group management, query optimization support, and user access controls. 

• Drive the platform upgrade and patching cadence, balancing stability with staying current on security fixes and feature releases across all services. 

• Build runbooks, on-call processes, and incident-response practices so the team can respond to and resolve production issues quickly and learn from them. 

• Ensure platform security across all services, including access controls, authentication (SSO/OIDC integration), secrets management, and audit logging. 

Platform Evolution & Roadmap 

• Lead the migration from Hive Metastore to Nessie as the versioned Iceberg catalog, delivering Git-like branching semantics, safe multi-writer coordination, and auditable catalog history. 

• Drive Lightdash platform improvements including version upgrades, performance optimization, row-level security configuration, and the governed self-service analytics experience. 

• Evolve the Coder platform through workspace template lifecycle management, resource policies, idle-stop tuning, and onboarding new users and use cases including AI coding agents. 

• Own the Jupyter and Redash platforms, ensuring availability, scaling, integration with Trino and the lakehouse, and user lifecycle management. 

• Evaluate and adopt new open-source technologies where they raise the platform’s ceiling or reduce operational burden. 

People Leadership 

• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of 3 to 5 platform engineers. Set clear expectations, provide regular feedback, and create career development paths. 

• Hire and build the team to match the platform’s growing scope and user base. 

• Foster a culture of operational excellence, automation over toil, and blameless incident retrospectives. 

• Set engineering standards for how the team builds, deploys, monitors, and documents platform services. 

Collaboration & Stakeholder Management 

• Partner with the DevOps/infrastructure team on Kubernetes capacity, networking, storage, and CI/CD pipeline needs for your platform services. 

• Serve as the platform liaison to data engineers, analysts, and FinOps practitioners. Understand their workflows, gather feedback, and prioritize improvements that unblock them. 

• Collaborate with the Data Platform and Data Governance teams to ensure platform services align with enterprise standards for security, lineage, and access control. 

• Support the broader Cloudera-to-lakehouse migration by ensuring Trino, Nessie, and the catalog layer are production-ready for migrated workloads. 

• Apply AI/ML tooling where it accelerates platform operations, monitoring, or user support. 

What success looks like 

• Platform services meet their SLOs consistently, and the team has the observability and processes to detect and resolve issues before users are affected. 

• Trino queries perform reliably at scale with well-managed resource groups and a clear upgrade cadence. 

• The Hive Metastore to Nessie migration is planned, sequenced, and executing without disruption to downstream users. 

• Lightdash and Coder are stable, current, and adopted broadly across the organization with minimal friction for new users. 

• The team is healthy, growing, and operating with clear ownership, automation, and documentation. 

• Internal users trust the platform and rarely lose productive time to platform instability. 

To be successful in this role, you have: 

• Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving. 

• 12+ years of experience in software or platform engineering, with 5+ years in engineering management leading teams that own production platform services, with a Bachelor’s degree; or 10 years and a Master’s degree; or a PhD with 7 years of experience in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field; or equivalent experience. 

• Proven track record managing teams that operate and scale open-source data infrastructure (query engines, BI platforms, developer environments, or similar) in production. 

• Hands-on experience operating distributed query engines (Trino, Presto, Spark, or similar) including cluster tuning, scaling, and performance optimization. 

• Strong knowledge of Kubernetes and containerized service deployment, enough to architect solutions and debug issues even if a separate team owns the clusters. 

• Demonstrated ability to establish SLOs, observability, and incident-response practices for platform services and to drive operational maturity over time. 

• Experience managing platform upgrades, migrations, and version lifecycle for open-source technologies in production without disrupting users. 

• Proven people leadership. Experience hiring, developing, and retaining strong platform engineers, and building team culture around operational excellence and automation. 

• Strong bias toward automation over manual toil, with experience building or directing the development of internal tooling and self-service workflows. 

• Excellent collaboration skills across engineering, data, DevOps, and business stakeholders. 

• Full professional proficiency in English. 

Technical Expertise 

• Distributed query engines. Trino or Presto operations including deployment, scaling, resource group management, query optimization, connector configuration, and upgrades. 

• Data catalog and lakehouse. Hive Metastore operations and familiarity with modern catalog alternatives (Nessie, AWS Glue, Unity Catalog, Polaris). Apache Iceberg table format concepts. 

• BI and analytics platforms. Operating self-hosted BI tools such as Lightdash, Redash, Metabase, or Superset, including deployment, scaling, SSO integration, and user management. 

• Developer platforms. Coder, JupyterHub, or similar cloud development environment platforms, including workspace provisioning, template management, and resource policies. 

• Observability. Monitoring, alerting, and logging for platform services (Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, or similar). SLO design and tracking. 

• Security and access control. SSO/OIDC integration, RBAC, row-level security, secrets management, and audit logging across platform services. 

• Infrastructure familiarity. Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CDK), and CI/CD pipelines. Enough depth to partner effectively with infra teams and architect platform deployments. 

• Scripting and automation. Python, Bash, or Go for operational tooling, automation, and integration work. 

Leadership & Communication 

• Proven ability to balance hands-on technical work with people leadership, knowing when to go deep and when to delegate. 

• Strong technical judgment with the ability to evaluate open-source technologies, make build-vs-buy decisions, and sequence a platform roadmap. 

• Effective stakeholder management across technical and non-technical audiences, translating platform capabilities and constraints into business terms. 

• Strong technical writing and documentation skills for runbooks, architecture decisions, and team processes. 

• Track record of building high-trust, high-ownership engineering teams. 

Nice to have 

• Direct experience operating Lightdash or dbt-integrated BI platforms. 

• Experience with Project Nessie or other versioned/transactional catalog systems. 

• Experience operating Coder or similar remote development environment platforms at scale. 

• Background in FinOps, cloud cost management, or financial data platforms. 

• Experience with Apache Iceberg table maintenance (compaction, snapshot expiry, partition evolution). 

• Experience in regulated or multi-environment cloud deployments (FedRAMP, GovCloud, or similar). 

• Open-source contributions to data infrastructure tooling. 

Why join us 

• Own the platform services that power FinOps analytics for all of ServiceNow’s cloud spend at global scale. 

• Lead a team building on a modern, fully open-source stack with real architectural influence. 

• Collaborate in a culture that values craftsmanship, quality, and innovation. 

• Work symbiotically with AI and automation tools that enhance engineering excellence and drive platform reliability. 

• Be part of a culture that encourages innovation, continuous learning, and shared success. 

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $190,900 - $334,100, 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.

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. Learn more here. To determine eligibility for a work persona, ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow office using a third-party service.

Equal Opportunity Employer

ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, gender identity,  veteran status, or any other category protected by law. In addition, all qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with legal requirements.  

Accommodations

We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are unable to use this online application and need an alternative method to apply, please contact [email protected] for assistance. 

Export Control Regulations

For positions requiring access to controlled technology subject to export control regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (EAR), ServiceNow may be required to obtain export control approval from government authorities for certain individuals. All employment is contingent upon ServiceNow obtaining any export license or other approval that may be required by relevant export control authorities. 

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