ServiceNow

Senior Software Engineering Manager - FinOps Platform Services

ServiceNow • $190K — $334K *
Pleasanton, CA 94566In-Person
Enterprise Technology
11 - 15 years of experience
Today
Be an Early Applicant
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 12+ years of software or platform engineering experience; 5+ years in engineering management.
  • Hands-on experience with distributed query engines (e.g., Trino, Presto) and performance optimization.
  • Strong knowledge of Kubernetes and containerized service deployment for effective solutions.
  • Proven ability to set SLOs, observability, and incident-response practices for platform services.
  • Experience managing platform upgrades and migrations with minimal disruption to users.
  • Demonstrated success in hiring and developing strong platform engineering teams.
  • Strong automation mindset, with experience developing internal tooling.

Responsibilities

  • Own operational health and reliability of various platform services, including Trino and Redash.
  • Establish SLOs for platform performance and availability; build dashboards for tracking.
  • Manage Trino cluster operations, including scaling and performance tuning.
  • Lead the migration from Hive Metastore to Nessie, ensuring smooth execution.
  • Drive improvements in the Lightdash platform to enhance user experience.
  • Develop runbooks and incident-response processes for efficient issue resolution.
  • Collaborate with DevOps to manage CI/CD pipeline needs and infrastructure.

Benefits

  • Own the platform services powering FinOps analytics on a global scale.
  • Influence architecture choices while working on a modern open-source stack.
  • Opportunities to innovate in a culture that values quality and craftsmanship.
  • Collaboration with AI tools that enhance operational excellence.
  • Continuous learning environment with an emphasis on shared success.
Full Job Description
Job Description

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.


Qualifications

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.

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. 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.

About ServiceNow

ServiceNow provides cloud-based solutions that define, structure, manage, and automate services for enterprise operations in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia Pacific, and other countries. The company offers service management solutions, including incident, problem, change, request, and cost management as well as service catalogs; and IT, HR, facilities, and field service management solutions. It also provides IT operations management solutions covering service mapping, delivery, and assurance solutions; business management solutions such as financial management, project portfolio suite, vendor performance management, and performance analytics as well as governance, risk, and compliance; and application development services.

ServiceNow Careers

Join the dynamic team at ServiceNow, a global leader in digital workflow solutions, where innovation and leadership converge to shape the future of work. At ServiceNow, we offer more than just job opportunities; we provide a platform for professional growth and a chance to be part of a culture that values diversity, creativity, and continuous learning.

Work You’ll Do

Embark on a career journey with ServiceNow and contribute to the world’s leading enterprises' digital transformation. Our team is at the forefront of developing cutting-edge technologies that improve how people work. With ServiceNow, you will use your skills to impact businesses and industries profoundly, driving efficiency and innovation.

Join Our Market-Leading Team

ServiceNow is not just another technology company. We are a team that thrives on diversity and leadership, fostering an inclusive environment that promotes growth and development. Our commitment to diversity training ensures that every team member can achieve their potential.

Innovative Work

ServiceNow is home to more than 10,000 dedicated professionals who lead the charge in digital workflows and enterprise solutions. As part of our team, you will engage in projects that merge technology with practical applications, creating revolutionary products that advance how services are delivered and managed.

Career Development

At ServiceNow, your career trajectory is filled with boundless opportunities. We support your growth with robust training programs, leadership development courses, and access to global challenges. Whether you are looking for an internship, full-time position, or leadership role, ServiceNow equips you with the tools to excel.

Be Part of a Great Team

Working at ServiceNow means being part of a community that values teamwork and innovation. Our collaborative environment encourages networking and sharing ideas, making our workplace vibrant and dynamic. The benefits of joining ServiceNow extend beyond comprehensive health and wellness; they include fostering professional connections and friendships that last a lifetime.

Explore Job Opportunities and Internships

Whether you’re a seasoned professional or a recent graduate, ServiceNow offers a range of employment options to suit your career goals. From internships that provide real-world experience to full-time positions that challenge you to leverage your expertise, we are committed to hiring the best talent.

Stay Connected

Join Our Team Search open positions that match your skills and interests. At ServiceNow, we look for passionate, curious, and solution-driven team players. Explore the possibilities that await you at a company that is committed to your professional success.

Keep Up to Date

Stay ahead with career tips, insider perspectives, and industry-leading insights you can put to use today—all from the people who work here.

Job Alert Emails

Customize your subscription to receive job alerts, the latest news, and insider tips tailored to your preferences. Discover the exciting and rewarding career opportunities that await at ServiceNow.

ServiceNow Careers

Empowering professionals to achieve more, ServiceNow is where careers are future-proofed, and ambitions are realized. Join us in our journey of growth and innovation.
Learn more about ServiceNow
Size
16,881 employees
Market Cap
$76.5 billion
Industry
Information Technology
Net Income
$118.5 million
Founded
2004
5 Year Trend
+33.5%
Revenue
$4.5 billion
NASDAQ
NOW
* Ladders Estimates

Similar Jobs

Ad banner background

Get Ready For Your
Next Interview

More Jobs at ServiceNow

More Enterprise Technology Jobs

Find similar Senior Software Engineering Manager - FinOps Platform Services jobs:

NationwidePleasanton, CA