Principal Systems Engineer

Principal Systems Engineer

Requirements

• 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.
• Can digest complexity and make it approachable by mortals and outsiders
• Can engage at the appropriate level – broad or deep – and knows which level of engagement is required for a given situation
• Can effectively communicate with all stakeholders: technical and not, management and not, junior staff through senior leadership
• Can guide teams through making good architectural decisions, breaking ties when necessary
• Can explain the appropriate relationships between components of a software system likely to change, grow and otherwise mutate over time
• Has the ability and is willing to coordinate and drive significant efforts, both with and without help from project and program managers
• Adopts a rigorous approach to modelling problems, identifying and then validating the assumptions in their own models with experts
• Is comfortable routinely collaborating with peers in the Pacific time zone
• Has a deep understanding of infrastructure concepts such as IP networking, block and file storage, load-balancers, etc.
• Is acquainted with common technologies used to build and maintain Linux-based systems, such as (but not limited to) Terraform, Cobbler, Puppet, Ansible, virtualization, containers, etc.
• Has a working understanding of related internet protocols such as DNS, LDAP, NTP, SMTP, HTTP, etc.
• Has integrity, honesty and can uphold ServiceNow’s values
• 5+ Architecture and systems lead experience

Responsibilities

• Provide technical oversight on implementations Systems Engineering teams
• Drive significant and impactful technical changes through the organization
• Mentor and cultivate the skills of other Systems Engineers
• Create and reinforce pragmatic processes to enable engineering teams to create appropriate architectures
• Decompose large work scopes into chunks manageable by less senior Systems Engineers
• Define, document and review infrastructure and software architectures for new systems
• Identify and evaluate strategic technologies and technical approaches for fitness, advocate for their adoption, and propose skills-training regimens to facilitate their support
• Get your hands dirty with implementations, opportunistically and occasionally

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in a SaaS environment, although not necessarily hyperscale (we’re in the middle of the curve, and hyperscale assumptions don’t always hold)
• Comfortable designing, authoring, testing, and debugging code in a popular systems language such as Python, Go, Java, or Ruby