Senior Staff Data Platform Software Engineer (Java Distributed Systems & Kafka)

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About This Role

ServiceNow is hiring a Senior Staff Data Platform Software Engineer specializing in Java distributed systems and Kafka to join its Data Platform group in Hyderabad. This position operates on-site. The team develops scalable and high-performance backend storage solutions and data-in-motion capabilities designed to support massive data volume, concurrency, and throughput. This role is intended for seasoned individual contributors who possess deep technical knowledge in distributed systems and Data Lake architectures.…

Job Description

Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and build high-performance distributed systems and platform capabilities
• Develop distributed data ingestion solutions emphasizing scalability, quality, and operational excellence
• Produce clean, modular, and reusable code while enforcing engineering best practices such as code reviews and unit testing
• Create foundational libraries, frameworks, and tools focused on extensibility, configurability, and maintainability
• Partner with engineering groups across the organization to align on requirements and deliver comprehensive solutions
• Drive high-risk and high-complexity projects through technical leadership
• Research, evaluate, and integrate new technologies to improve platform functionality
• Diagnose and resolve complicated production incidents across distributed systems

Requirements

• 15 to 20 years of hands-on engineering experience within distributed systems, data platforms, or large-scale backend infrastructure
• Strong command of distributed systems architecture, design patterns, and algorithms
• Deep Java programming expertise, covering JVM internals, memory models, and garbage collection
• Demonstrated background in JVM performance profiling, tuning, and bottleneck resolution
• Thorough understanding of networking, concurrency, sockets, operating system internals, and optimization
• Practical experience constructing and running large-scale distributed systems
• Familiarity with relational databases including Oracle, MySQL, or PostgreSQL
• Extensive background in large-scale distributed system deployments, replication, high availability, and fault-tolerant strategies
• Experience operating within DevOps environments to operationalize distributed platforms

Qualifications

• Expertise in designing platforms using Kubernetes for workload deployments, upgrades, and monitoring
• Familiarity with Apache Iceberg covering tables, catalogs, schema evolution, and metadata management
• Experience with Apache Kafka high-scale clusters, partition strategies, and high availability
• Knowledge of Apache Flink for stateful stream processing and exactly-once semantics
• Familiarity with Apache Spark batch and streaming jobs, optimization, and partitioning
• Proficiency with data formats such as Parquet, ORC, and Avro alongside compaction and governance strategies

Core Skills

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