Principal Engineer - Data Platform

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Employees can work remotely Job Description Team Join the Global Cloud Services organization's FinOps Tools team, which is building ServiceNow's next-generation analytics and financial governance platform. Our team owns the full modern data stack: Trino for distributed queries, dbt for transformations, Iceberg for lakehouse architecture, Lightdash for business intelligence, and Argo Workflows for orchestration. As the Distinguished Engineer for the FinOps Engineering Platform, you will set and own the technical vision and architecture for the entire platform, the single technical authority who unifies the data platform, the cloud development platform, the underlying multi-cloud infrastructure, and our forecasting and capacity-reservation automation into one coherent system. You will also lead the design and development of the GCS Data Warehouse, the modern lakehouse foundation that will replace and migrate the organization's existing Cloudera-based data platform, and that everything else in the FinOps Engineering Platform is built upon. Role The FinOps Engineering Platform spans several major workstreams, each with its own Senior Staff engineers building it: the analytics and cost-governance data platform (Trino, dbt, Iceberg, Lightdash), the cloud development platform that takes analytics from notebook to production, the multi-cloud DevOps and SRE infrastructure it all runs on, the Forecast Engine that turns capacity and cost actuals into forward-looking forecasts, and the Future Capacity Reservation (FCR) automation those forecasts feed. As our Distinguished Engineer, you will lead all of it. Underpinning all of it is the GCS Data Warehouse, and you will lead its design and development. This is the program that modernizes ServiceNow's Global Cloud Services data platform by migrating it off Cloudera (Impala, Hive, HDFS) onto the modern lakehouse (Trino, Iceberg, dbt). You will own the target architecture, the migration strategy, and the correctness bar for moving years of accumulated tables, transformations, pipelines, and consumers onto the new foundation with zero data loss, then retiring the legacy platform. Because the data platform, Forecast Engine, and FCR automation all read from and write to this warehouse, getting its architecture and migration right is the highest-leverage work on the platform. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a management role. You will define the cross-cutting architecture, set the standards every workstream builds against, make the highest-leverage technical decisions, and keep the whole platform coherent as it scales. You will not manage people; you will lead through architecture, deep technical judgment, and influence, partnering closely with the Senior Staff engineers who own each workstream and with Engineering and FinOps leadership. This is a unique opportunity to define the technical foundation and long-term direction of cloud financial management at ServiceNow's scale, and to do it at startup velocity within a Fortune 500 environment. What You Get To Do In This Role Own the end-to-end technical architecture of the FinOps Engineering Platform, ensuring the GCS Data Warehouse, data platform, development platform, infrastructure, Forecast Engine, and FCR automation compose into one coherent, scalable system. Lead the design and development of the GCS Data Warehouse and the program to migrate ServiceNow's Global Cloud Services data platform off Cloudera onto the modern lakehouse, with zero data loss and verified correctness. Set the technical vision and multi-year roadmap for the platform, and translate it into the concrete standards and interfaces each workstream builds against. Make the highest-leverage, hardest-to-reverse technical decisions: technology selection, system boundaries, data contracts, and the architectural patterns that span workstreams. Establish platform-wide engineering standards for reliability, determinism, observability, security, and production readiness, and hold the bar across teams. Lead through influence: partner with the Senior Staff engineers who own each workstream, review their designs, resolve cross-team architectural tensions, and align everyone to a single technical direction. Drive innovation across the platform, including the responsible use of AI/ML tooling to accelerate development and improve platform capabilities. Foster a culture of engineering craftsmanship, knowledge-sharing, and thoughtful quality practices across every team building on the platform. Move fast: keep the platform shipping in tight, high-velocity loops while protecting the architectural integrity that lets it scale. Technical Leadership & Architecture Define the reference architecture for the FinOps Engineering Platform and the contracts between its parts: how the data platform serves the Forecast Engine, how forecasts drive FCR automation, how the development platform productionizes analytics, and how all of it runs on the shared infrast

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