Senior Manager, Database Engineering Management

About the Company

ServiceNow was founded when engineer Fred Luddy automated tedious tasks, enabling people to focus on meaningful work. Today, ServiceNow serves as an AI control tower for business transformation, integrating AI, data, and workflows to enable 85% of Fortune 500 companies to operate more efficiently. The company fosters an AI-native culture combining technology and talent and is continuing to grow rapidly.

Role Overview

We are looking for a seasoned Senior Manager to lead our Database Engineering team, focusing on database performance, incident management, reliability engineering, observability, and capacity planning. This role demands deep technical knowledge of PostgreSQL and similar architectures, large distributed systems, and production environments with customer focus, alongside strong leadership and operational expertise.

Key Responsibilities

• Set and execute strategies for performance, scalability, and efficient database operation in large production setups.
• Lead projects aimed at improving query times, reducing latency, optimizing workloads, and removing systemic bottlenecks.
• Establish standards for performance benchmarks, tuning, and best engineering practices.
• Collaborate with application, platform, and infrastructure teams to embed performance considerations across the software development lifecycle.
• Define goals for performance, reliability, and availability of critical database services.
• Promote proactive monitoring, observability, and automation to maintain operational health.
• Lead resolution of complex production issues and critical escalations involving customers.
• Conduct thorough root cause analyses and ensure long-term corrective measures are applied.
• Work with engineering leadership to guide platform strategy and architecture for RaptorDB.
• Recruit, manage, and develop a top-tier performance and reliability engineering team.
• Manage team priorities including projects, objectives, career development, and performance evaluations.
• Oversee a 24/7 on-call team to ensure continuous support coverage.
• Drive a culture aiming to eliminate repetitive manual tasks through automation to enhance scalability and efficiency.
• Coordinate with partnering teams to strengthen application and platform reliability.
• Participate in escalation and crisis management efforts towards sustainable solutions.
• Evaluate and improve existing processes to foster continuous efficiency gains.
• Provide training, documentation, and support for teams interfacing with the SWAT unit.
• Facilitate onboarding of new hires and integration of new technologies and automations.

Essential Qualifications

• Over 10 years of experience in database engineering, performance engineering, site reliability engineering, or large-scale platform operations.
• More than 5 years of experience managing high-performing technical engineering teams.
• Expert understanding of PostgreSQL and distributed database systems.
• Strong skills in query optimization, execution planning, indexing, replication, concurrency management, and workload scheduling.
• Proven experience handling major incident responses and high-stakes production escalations.
• Background working with large SaaS or cloud-native platforms supporting enterprise clients.
• Excellent analytical, communication, and stakeholder management capabilities.
• Experience in delivering software, platform, and infrastructure as services.
• Familiarity with ITIL principles and methodologies.
• Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills, both written and spoken.
• Meticulous attention to detail.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computing Science, related technical discipline, or equivalent industry experience.

Preferred but Not Required

• Hands-on experience operating PostgreSQL at hyperscale.
• Building automation frameworks to enhance operational excellence and decrease incidents.
• Ability to influence cross-organizational technical strategies.
• Experience using ServiceNow solutions.

Additional Information

Work arrangements are flexible based on job requirements and location proximity to ServiceNow offices. ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer, committed to diversity and inclusion regardless of race, sex, religion, or other protected characteristics. Accommodations are available upon request to support applicants with disabilities during recruitment.

Employment is contingent upon compliance with export control regulations, including obtaining necessary government approvals as required.