Senior Staff Network Automation Engineer - Reliability Operations - Federal

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
Please Note: This position will include supporting our US Federal & Public Sector customers.
"This position requires passing a ServiceNow background screening, USFedPASS (US Federal Personnel Authorization Screening Standards). This includes a credit check, criminal/misdemeanor check and taking a drug test. Any employment is contingent upon passing the screening. Due to Federal requirements, only US citizens, US naturalized citizens or US Permanent Residents, holding a green card, will be considered.
Keep the ServiceNow cloud running. Write the code that makes it automatic.
Cloud Network Services (CNS) designs, delivers, and operates the global infrastructure behind our products-every data center, every network path, every watt. When something's hard to scale or keep reliable, we don't throw people at the problem-we engineer it away with software. You'll join Network Reliability & Resiliency (NR2): a diverse crew of network, software, hardware, and operations pros who reduce mean time to mitigate and remediate by building automation, not runbooks. We partner across Global Cloud Services (GCS) to deliver safety, security, and seemingly infinite capacity at the lowest possible cost-and we ship boldly, own outcomes end-to-end, and learn like mad. If you're a builder who loves production, incidents, and code that turns chaos into consistency, this is your team.
Location: Flexible within U.S. time zones with periodic data center/site visits as needed
On-call: Rotating pager for production incidents (including some weekends) with strong focus on automation to reduce pages
Why this role exists
Our network is expanding in scale and complexity. We need a senior leader / builder who can own design through operations, write the software that deploys and heals the network, and coach others to do the same. You'll turn tribal knowledge into pipelines, toil into bots, and postmortems into platform features.
What you get to do in this role:

• Own the lifecycle of production IP networks-design, engineering, implementation, and operations escalation-with a bias to automate everything you touch.
• Architect and evolve highly available, hyper-scale network segments; drive from concept through launch and long-term reliability.
• Lead with code: build tooling in Python/Go/Bash; ship IaC (Terraform/Ansible) and CI/CD to make changes safe, fast, and observable. (The team already leverages PowerShell, shell scripting, Perl/Python, Ansible, Terraform, and CI/CD via DevOps/Bitbucket/GitHub-your job is to raise the bar.)
• Operational excellence: instrument SLIs/SLOs, shrink MTTR, and eliminate classes of incidents via automation, config hygiene, and safe change patterns.
• Incident leadership: run or advise bridges for complex outages; perform detailed diagnosis; drive deep, blameless learnings into automated prevent/restore paths.
• Change management at scale: review, test, and rollout network changes with progressive delivery and automated verification.
• Mentor & multiply: coach engineers across networking and software; model high standards in design docs, code reviews, and post-incident reviews.

Tech you'll touch

• Protocols & platforms: BGP, OSPF, ISIS, HSRP/VRRP, IPsec, SNMP; deep TCP/IP analysis (Wireshark, etc.); vendor stacks incl. Cisco IOS and JunOS; Cisco ASA. Container based NGINX ADC (Application Delivery Controller) with Linux and Docker.
• Observability & monitoring: Splunk, Cacti, ThousandEyes (plus the tooling you'll help us build).
• Cloud & app surfaces: Azure core (Compute/Storage/Networking) and Web Apps; multi-cloud familiarity a plus.
• Automation & pipelines: PowerShell, Python, Go, Terraform/Ansible; CI/CD with DevOps/Bitbucket/GitHub

Qualifications
To be successful in this role you have:

• Hands-on operator who codes: you've automated network deployment/ops and reduced pages with your software.
• 10+ years of experience building and running large internet or data center networks; you're at ease designing, reviewing, and operating at scale. (Minimum 5+ years with internet/DC networks.)
• Expert in routing & traffic engineering: comfortable with BGP/OSPF/ISIS and modern packet forwarding architectures; you debug at L3/L4 with packet captures when it matters.
• Automation mindset: strong Python (or Go) plus experience with IaC and CI/CD; you default to "code first" over manual change.
• Calm under pressure: you've led high-stakes incidents and turned learnings into permanent fixes.
• Excellent communicator & partner: you work fluidly with SRE, program managers, and globally distributed peers.
• Bias to learn: curiosity for how AI can streamline workflows and decision-making in network operations.

Nice to have

• Experience integrating vendor ecosystems (e.g., Palo Alto, Juniper, Cisco) into unified automation frameworks.
• Familiarity with service load balancing (L4/L7), MPLS, and large-scale edge patterns.

How we work (pragmatic details)

• On-call rotation shared across the team; we invest in automating noisy alerts and eliminating recurring pages.
• Sustainment with foresight: we proactively analyze capacity/availability to fix issues before they become incidents and plan software/code upgrades and device maintenance with low risk.
• Change readiness: we review and prepare for all planned production changes; we validate and track problems in a modern ticketing flow.

What success looks like in your first 6 months

• You've mapped the network and internal processes and can operate confidently within our architecture and org.
• You've led incident bridges and mitigated outages as the networking expert on call.
• You own two data centers for sustainment engineering-health, capacity, and resiliency.
• With SRE, you've identified and eliminated one high pain process via automation (e.g., "buttonclick" rollbacks or selfhealing for a top offender)

GCS-23
For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $146,400 - $256,200, 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.
Equal Opportunity Employer
ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin or nationality, ancestry, age, disability, gender identity or expression, marital status, 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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