Sr. Manager, ServiceNow Platform Engineering

THE ROLE

The Sr. Manager, ServiceNow Platform Engineering leads the enterprise ServiceNow platform engineering function—owning platform engineering, reliability, and operations across internal services and CX-facing capabilities. This role heads the Platform Engineering & Support pillar within the ServiceNow Center of Excellence & Innovation (CoEI), partnering with the ServiceNow Platform Architect on technical governance, standards, and guardrails so product teams can build safely at speed while the platform remains performant, secure, compliant, and audit‑ready. The Sr. Manager builds and leads a multi‑disciplinary engineering team, partners closely with Portfolio Governance and Strategy boards, and regularly engages VP‑level stakeholders to communicate platform strategy, risk posture, and value.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Lead the ServiceNow CoEI’s Platform Engineering & Support pillar, aligning operating rhythms with the CoEI Operating Model (decision rights, RACI, intake, prioritization, and exception processes).
• Partner with the ServiceNow Platform Architect to lead the Technical Governance Board; partner with Portfolio Governance and Strategy boards to ensure platform standards, investment choices, and risk decisions are coherent and transparent.
• Partner with the ServiceNow Platform Architect to define, publish, and maintain platform policies and technical guardrails; ensure governance outcomes are measurable and improve over time (e.g., change success rate, exception volume, audit findings).
• Build, lead, and develop a high‑performing platform team (e.g., engineering managers, administrators, developers, integration engineers, QA/ATF, release/environment managers), including hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development.
• Establish clear ways of working across product teams and shared services (DevOps/Cloud, Security/GRC, Data/CMDB, PMO/SPM), reinforcing engineering discipline, quality, and accountability.
• Manage vendor relationships and augment capacity with partners as needed; steward budget aligned to value and risk.
• Own instance and environment strategy (prod/sub‑prod topology, cloning and data masking, drift controls, Store app governance, and domain separation where applicable).
• Implement CI/CD pipelines with segregation of duties, code review, static analysis/linting, and automated test gates (ATF smoke/regression baselines per domain) to increase change quality and speed.
• Govern release and deployment processes (calendar, approvals, rollback criteria, evidence) in partnership with Change/PMO; ensure repeatable upgrade waves with minimal disruption.
• Drive performance, availability, and resilience through SRE practices (end‑to‑end observability, meaningful SLOs and error budgets, capacity planning); own L3/L4 incident/problem management and blameless post‑mortems.
• Enforce platform security and compliance (secure SDLC, encryption and key management, access models/SoD, vulnerability and patch posture, audit readiness).
• Partner with ServiceNow Platform Architect on design standards, coding conventions, reuse patterns, and review processes; maintain a blueprint/reference architecture library and enforce adherence through automated and manual checks.
• Ensure strong CSDM and CMDB alignment (data model ownership, discovery/service mapping integrations, data quality KPIs) to underpin reporting, automation, and resilience.
• Establish guardrails for citizen development and App Engine usage (data, security, and performance boundaries; certification/publishing workflow; monitoring and supportability).
• Standardize integration patterns (API/event contracts, idempotency/retry, IntegrationHub strategy and spoke lifecycle, MID server posture) and monitor for drift.
• Engage regularly with VP‑level business and technology leaders; present platform strategy, investment tradeoffs, risk posture, and roadmap to executive steering bodies.
• Translate complex technical topics into clear narratives and visuals for non‑technical audiences; influence outc