Senior Linux Kernel Engineer

Company Description

It all started in sunny San Diego, California in 2004 when a visionary engineer, Fred Luddy, saw the potential to transform how we work. Fast forward to today — Service Now stands as a global market leader, bringing innovative AI-enhanced technology to over 8,100 customers, including 85% of the Fortune 500®. Our intelligent cloud-based platform seamlessly connects people, systems, and processes to empower organizations to find smarter, faster, and better ways to work.

But this is just the beginning of our journey. Join us as we pursue our purpose to make the world work better for everyone.

NOTE:

This position requires passing a Service Now background screening, USFedPASS (USFederal Personnel Authorization Screening Standards). This includes a credit check, criminal/misdemeanor check and taking a drug test. Any employment is contingent upon passing the screening. Due to Federal requirements, only US citizens, US naturalized citizens or US Permanent Residents, holding a green card, will be considered.

Location: Kirkland, WA OR San Diego, CA is preferred.

This position reports to: Sr. Manager, OS Engineering

The Systems Engineering team at Service Now is looking for a Sr. Staff-level technical leader to own and evolve our Linux Red Hat platform. This role sits within the Linux Center of Expertise and is responsible for Red Hat OS release strategy, Linux kernel operational support, OS automation, and enterprise Linux package distribution across our global cloud footprint. You’ll define the technical direction for RHEL and kernel usage at Service Now, partnering closely with Red Hat, Hardware Engineering, and internal Operational Program Management teams to ensure our platform is secure, performant, and easy to consume at scale.

• Lead the Red Hat OS & Kernel strategy
  • Define and maintain the reference RHEL OS baseline (RHEL 8/9 and beyond), including kernel versions, tuning profiles, and hardening standards.
  • Partner with Red Hat and hardware vendors to validate kernels, drivers, and firmware for new platforms and features (NVMe, GPUs, NUMA, cgroups/containers, etc.).
• Own kernel operational support at scale
  • Diagnose and resolve complex kernel-level issues (crashes, hangs, performance regressions) using tools such as crash, kdump, perf, eBPF, systemtap, and systemd/journal analysis.
  • Drive root cause analysis and long‑term remediation for OS and kernel incidents, and translate findings into improved standards, automation, and observability.
• Drive OS automation and configuration at enterprise scale
  • Design and implement scalable automation using Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) and Red Hat Satellite to manage lifecycle operations (provisioning, patching, subscription/content management, and drift remediation).
  • Collaborate with Puppet and configuration management team members to ensure a cohesive “everything as code” model for OS configuration across bare metal, VMs, and cloud platforms.
• Modernize Linux package distribution, observability and supply chain
  • Define and maintain the strategy for internal RPM repositories, content views, and promotion workflows across environments (dev → staging → production).
  • Work with security, OS Engineering team members and platform teams to improve software supply‑chain integrity for OS packages (signing, SBOMs, auditability).
  • Define and implement observability standards (metrics, logs, events) for OS and kernel health, ensuring issues can be detected and remediated proactively.
• Provide technical leadership across the organization
  • Act as the primary subject‑matter expert and escalation point for RHEL and kernel topics across Systems Engineering and partner teams.
  • Support On‑call schedule and act as escalation point of contact for Red Hat Linux P0 incidents.
  • Mentor other engineers, drive design reviews, and set high engineering standards for reliability, security, and simplicity in our OS stack.
  • Influence roadmaps across multiple teams to align with OS and kernel best practices, including container platforms, storage, networking, and security.

To be successful in this role you have:

• Experience in leveraging or…