Senior Staff Quality Performance Engineer

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 changing the way people work. With a service-orientation toward the activities, tasks and processes that make up day-to-day work life, we help the modern enterprise operate faster and be more scalable than ever before. We're disruptive. We work hard but try not to take ourselves too seriously. We are highly adaptable and constantly evolving. We are passionate about our product, and we live for our customers. We have high expectations and a career at ServiceNow means challenging yourself to always be better.
We are the Platform Data - Relational QE (Quality Engineering) team, focused on ensuring the reliability and performance of the Now Platform's relational database. Our work includes testing and validating data storage, retrieval, and relationship management capabilities-covering database schemas, data consistency, and query performance.
What you get to do in this role:
We're seeking an experienced performance engineer with a strong record of building technologies and tools that measure the performance and scalability of complex systems. In collaboration with Platform Engineering, Cloud Development, and Service Operations teams, you'll help ensure our platform can support the scale and demands of our largest customers.
The ideal candidate is a software performance engineer with expertise in web application benchmarking, test automation, performance analysis, and capacity planning. You should have a passion for developing and applying tools that evaluate complex systems under real-world load conditions. You'll be working in a fast-paced, innovative environment with the opportunity to make a direct impact on our platform and customer success.
In this role, you'll build infrastructure, automation, and tools to simulate realistic workloads across our core platform services. You'll also empower peers across engineering, customer support, and cloud operations to utilize these tools for related performance and scalability initiatives.
Qualifications
In order to be successful in this role, we need someone who has:

• 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
• 12+ years of experience in DevOps, Performance Engineering, and/or Tools Development for enterprise-scale systems
• Extensive experience testing large-scale web-based distributed applications on containers such as Apache/Tomcat, JBoss, WebLogic, and WebSphere in Linux production environments using Postgres, MySQL, or Oracle
• Strong communication, collaboration, problem-solving, conflict resolution, and time management skills; able to tailor communication style to suit various audiences
• Proven ability in benchmarking system and database performance, capacity sizing, and identifying optimization opportunities
• Skilled at analyzing customer usage patterns to determine key performance requirements
• Experienced in recommending and implementing configuration tuning to address performance bottlenecks
• Proficient in troubleshooting and debugging application and server logs, with the ability to triage complex issues effectively
• Experienced in setting up and configuring multi-node application and database environments
• Strong knowledge of job control and hands-on expertise in shell scripting and text processing tools (e.g., awk, sed, Perl)
• Analytical and detail-oriented, with a passion for continuous learning and new technologies
• Effective team contributor with a strong sense of ownership and attention to detail
• BS/MS in Computer Science with a track record of developing and deploying mission-critical software
• Strongly Desired:
• Deep expertise with CentOS/RedHat in large-scale production environments
• Familiarity with monitoring and testing tools such as AppDynamics, Jenkins, Splunk, and New Relic
• Solid background in agile software development methodologies, particularly Scrum
• Experience with the ServiceNow platform, including custom development beyond out-of-the-box configurations
• Knowledge of concurrency, multithreading, and distributed system deployment
• Understanding of database schemas, tablespaces, indexing, and performance tuning
• Foundational knowledge of AI technologies, including Agentic AI, algorithms, LLM models, RAG frameworks, and knowledge graphs
• 12 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 8 years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with 5 years experience; or equivalent experience

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $187,600 - $328,300, 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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