Sr Manager, Database Performance Engineering

Company Description

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.

Job Description

Team:

ServiceNow is seeking an experienced Sr Manager for our Database Engineering team.

This leader will drive engineering excellence across database performance, incident management, reliability engineering, observability, and capacity planning. The role requires deep technical expertise in PostgreSQL-based/equivalent architectures, large-scale distributed systems, and customer-facing production environments, combined with strong people leadership and operational rigor.

The ideal candidate has experience leading high-performing engineering teams responsible for solving complex performance challenges, responding to critical customer escalations, and building sustainable solutions that improve platform resilience at scale.

You should have experience with large scale Web applications and MySQL/MariaDB environments and a knack for problem solving and optimization databases, application and performance issues. Qualified candidates will be responsible for leading a team of highly skilled engineers that push the limits of scalability.

**Do you **

• Have experience in leading a team of engineers and people management?

• Enjoy problem solving and an analytical mindset to help determine the reasons why things fail?

• Have a technical background in roles including DBA, systems/cloud engineering or DevOps?

• Know Linux operating systems and Databases to the level of troubleshooting and diagnostics?

• Have an attitude of continuous improvement and strive to remove in-efficient process?

Answer 'yes' to these questions and we want to hear from you. Hit the Apply button and let's have a chat about the role and your skills and experiences.

Let’s start with the role

As a Manager of the SWAT team your responsibilities will be:

• Define and execute the strategy for database performance, scalability, and efficiency across large-scale production environments.

• Lead initiatives to improve query performance, reduce latency, optimize workload distribution, and eliminate systemic bottlenecks.

• Establish performance benchmarks, tuning standards, and engineering best practices.

• Partner with application, platform, and infrastructure teams to ensure performance considerations are incorporated into every stage of the software lifecycle.

• Establish performance, reliability, and availability goals for critical database services.

• Champion proactive monitoring, observability, and automation to improve operational health.

• Lead the resolution of complex production issues and customer-critical escalations.

• Drive deep root cause analysis and ensure sustainable corrective actions are implemented.

• Partner with engineering leaders to shape RaptorDB platform strategy and architecture.

• Build and develop a world-class team of performance and reliability engineers.

• Team management, recruitment, career development, objective setting, projects prioritization and performance review

• Experience of managing an ‘on call’ team covering 24 x 7

• Drive a culture of intolerance of repetitive manual activities by promoting efforts towards automation, thus enabling scaling and removing in-efficiency.

• Drive initiatives with partner teams to improve the reliability of the ServiceNow application and platform.

• Act as part of the escalation crisis management team to orchestrate actions towards sustainable solutions.

• Analysis and evaluation of existing processes to drive continuous improvement and efficiencies.

• Provide training, documentation and support to partner teams that interface with SWAT.

• Onboarding of new hires to enable their success in their roles.

• Onboarding of new technologies, systems and automations into the team.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in database engineering, performance engineering, site reliability engineering, or large-scale platform operations.

• 5+ years of engineering leadership experience managing high-performing technical teams.

• Deep expertise in PostgreSQL and distributed database architectures.

• Strong understanding of query optimization, execution planning, indexing strategies, replication, concurrency control, and workload management.

• Experience leading major incident response and customer-critical production escalations.

• Experience with large-scale SaaS or cloud-native platforms supporting enterprise customers.

• Strong analytical, communication, and stakeholder management skills.

• Experience working in software, platform and infrastructure delivered as a service.

• Knowledge of principles and methods involving ITIL.

• Outstanding interpersonal skills and strong communication skills, both written and verbal.

• Uncompromising attention to detail.

• Bachelor's degree in Computing Science or related technical field, or equivalent work experience.

These are not a 'must', but please highlight them on your resume if you have:

• Experience operating PostgreSQL at hyperscale.

• Experience building automation frameworks for operational excellence and incident reduction.

• Demonstrated ability to influence technical strategy across multiple engineering organizations.

• Experience of using ServiceNow

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, 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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