Principal Engineer - Data Platform

Google Chrome Microsoft Edge Apple Safari Mozilla Firefox Principal Engineer - Data Platform Full-timeEmployee Type: RegularRegion: AMS - North America and CanadaWork Persona: Flexible or RemoteCompany DescriptionIt 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 DescriptionEmployees can work remotelyTeam Join the Global Cloud Services (GCS) organization's platform engineering team, which is building ServiceNow's next-generation data foundation on the modern stack: Trino for distributed queries, dbt for transformations, Iceberg for lakehouse architecture, and Argo Workflows for orchestration. At the center of that effort is the GCS Data Warehouse, the modern lakehouse that will replace the organization's existing Cloudera-based data platform and serve as the substrate every GCS data consumer is built upon.Role As Principal Engineer for Data Platform Modernization, you will be the foundational architect for the GCS Data Warehouse and everything upstream of the query layer: how data lands, how it is transformed, and how it is served as correct, well-governed tables on the lakehouse. You will own the target architecture and lead the program that moves ServiceNow's Global Cloud Services data off Cloudera (Impala, Hive, HDFS, Hive Metastore) onto the modern lakehouse (Trino, Iceberg, dbt, a modern catalog). The estate is real: hundreds of tables and pipelines feeding dozens of downstream consumers, with years of accumulated history, spread today across on-premises, virtualized, and cloud clusters in multiple regions. Your job is to design the new foundation, stand up the ingestion and transformation layers that feed it, and move those workloads onto it with verified correctness and zero data loss at petabyte scale. The platform runs in the public cloud, and it must operate across both commercial and regulated environments. ServiceNow's regulated footprint includes government and other controlled enclaves with their own isolation, data-residency, and compliance requirements, so this is not a single-account, single-region system. You will design one portable architecture that deploys independently into each boundary, commercial and regulated alike, carrying the right isolation, access control, and audit posture into each. Getting that portability right is one of the hardest and most defining parts of the role. This is a one-year program with a clear end state: Cloudera decommissioned, so the organization does not renew it. There is a concrete cost and consolidation mandate behind that deadline, and it shapes every decision. You will make the high-leverage architectural calls fast, sequence the work so the platform is proven incrementally rather than in one high-risk cutover, and keep it moving at pace. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a management role. You will define the architecture, set the correctness and quality bar, make the hardest technical decisions, and keep the platform coherent as it scales. You will not manage people; you will lead through architecture, deep technical judgment, and influence, partnering closely with the engineers building alongside you and with Engineering and GCS leadership. This is a unique opportunity to define the data foundation for all of Global Cloud Services at ServiceNow's scale, and to do it at startup velocity within a Fortune 500 environment. What you get to do...