Sr. Manager DevOps Engineering

This opportunity is part of the Global Technology Enterprise Products & Platforms (EPP) team, focused on Enterprise Service Management (ESM) and the continued evolution of the ServiceNow platform as a secure, scalable, reliable, and upgrade-ready enterprise capability. The role is accountable for the engineering practices, release discipline, environment governance, testing strategy, and operational controls that enable platform teams to deliver high-quality changes safely, consistently, and efficiently.

The Sr. Manager, DevOps Engineering - ServiceNow Platform is a senior engineering leader responsible for the DevOps, release, and quality engineering capabilities that protect the health, stability, and delivery velocity of the ServiceNow platform. This role leads the practices and team accountable for instance management, code review discipline, platform upgrades, platform maintenance, release management, and QA engineering, including Automated Test Framework (ATF) strategy and execution.

The leader partners across platform architecture, product management, development pods, QA, security, data, integration, and operations teams to ensure changes are governed, tested, promoted, and supported in a way that reduces risk while accelerating delivery.

Success in this role requires deep expertise in ServiceNow platform engineering and DevOps practices, including environment and instance strategy, promotion controls, code quality standards, source control and deployment automation, regression testing, release readiness, upgrade planning, platform maintenance, and operational governance. This leader defines and enforces the ways of working that help teams deliver changes consistently across development, test, and production environments while maintaining reliability, compliance, and user satisfaction.

This position reports to the Platform Owner and works closely with product development pods, platform architecture, QA engineering, security, integration, data, and support teams across the ESM ecosystem.

Responsibilities & Accountabilities:

• Lead and evolve the ServiceNow platform DevOps and QA engineering operating model, including the practices, standards, tooling, controls, and team capabilities required to support safe, scalable, and efficient delivery.
• Own environment and instance management strategy across development, test, QA, staging, and production, including environment purpose, refresh approach, access controls, configuration consistency, and promotion paths.
• Establish and govern release management processes that improve visibility, readiness, traceability, deployment quality, change control, and rollback preparedness for platform and application changes.
• Define and enforce code review and engineering quality standards for ServiceNow development and configuration, including update set or application promotion, source control usage, peer review, and deployment discipline.
• Lead platform upgrade planning and execution, including impact assessment, release note review, customization analysis, dependency validation, remediation planning, regression coordination, stakeholder readiness, and production cutover support.
• Own platform maintenance practices such as patching coordination, technical debt management, plugin and feature evaluation, instance health review, performance monitoring, defect prioritization, and continuous hardening of the platform.
• Lead the QA engineering and ATF strategy for the platform, including test design standards, regression suite coverage, release validation, upgrade testing, test data discipline, and the integration of automated testing into delivery pipelines.
• Drive the use of automation to reduce manual release effort and increase consistency across deployments, including CI/CD-enabling capabilities, quality gates, environment checks, promotion controls, and deployment evidence.
• Partner with architecture and platform leadership to maintain upgrade-safe design principles, reduce environment drift, limit unnecessary customization, and improve long-term maintainability and platform resilience.
• Provide governance and decision support for release risk, testing readiness, production supportability, and operational impacts, balancing speed of delivery with stability, control, compliance, and user experience.
• Build and lead a high-performing DevOps and QA engineering team, coaching engineers on ServiceNow engineering practices, code quality, release rigor, automation discipline, and continuous improvement.
• Use KPIs and operational metrics such as deployment success rate, release predictability, defect leakage, test automation coverage, upgrade readiness, environment stability, and mean time to recovery to drive measurable improvement.

Qualifications:

Basic Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience in DevOps engineering, platform engineering, release management, quality engineering, ServiceNow engineering, or a related field with a Bachelors degree, or 6+ years of relevant experience with a Masters degree.
• Demonstrated experience leading engineering teams or delivery functions responsible for ServiceNow platform operations, release management, environment governance, upgrades, QA engineering, or related platform capabilities in a complex enterprise environment.
• Strong understanding of ServiceNow platform architecture, development lifecycle, release management, environment strategy, testing methods, and production support practices.
• Proven ability to define and implement engineering standards, code review practices, release controls, testing strategies, and operational governance that improve delivery quality and reduce risk.
• Experience leading cross-functional teams and working collaboratively with architects, developers, QA, product leaders, security, integration, data, and operations teams to deliver outcomes.
• Hands-on experience with release planning, issue triage, root cause analysis, continuous improvement, and operational readiness practices.
• Experience using metrics and engineering data to improve release predictability, platform stability, quality outcomes, and team performance.
• Strong communication, influencing, decision-making, and problem-solving skills with the ability to lead through complexity and ambiguity.
• Experience working with governance, controls, secure engineering practices, and enterprise change management principles in a platform environment.
• Willingness and ability to live the McDonalds values every day: Serve, Inclusion, Integrity, Community, and Family.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Deep knowledge of ServiceNow engineering and platform administration practices, including instance management, update set or application promotion, source control, release orchestration, and environment governance.
• Experience leading or improving ServiceNow release management practices with strong attention to traceability, deployment quality, rollback planning, and production change control.
• Hands-on experience with ServiceNow upgrades, patching cycles, release note analysis, customization remediation, and regression planning across enterprise instances.
• Experience building or governing Automated Test Framework (ATF) strategies, regression suites, test standards, and automation practices that improve release confidence and reduce manual effort.
• Knowledge of CI/CD patterns, source control, quality gates, deployment automation, and engineering workflows that improve consistency and auditability for ServiceNow delivery.
• Experience establishing code review practices, development standards, and governance guardrails that support upgrade-safe, maintainable, and supportable platform delivery.
• Experience collaborating with platform owners, architects, product managers, developers, QA engineers, and operations teams to improve delivery maturity and platform resilience.
• Ability to provide thought leadership on engineering maturity, release governance, platform maintenance, upgrade readiness, and quality automation for a growing ServiceNow ecosystem.
• Preferred certifications include ServiceNow Certified System Administrator (CSA), Certified Application Developer (CAD), and relevant implementation or platform certifications. Experience with Jenkins, GitHub, Azure DevOps, Jira, Confluence, or similar tools that support DevOps, release management, testing, and documentation is a plus.
• Strong bias for disciplined execution, engineering quality, platform stability, automation, and delivering business value through reliable platform operations.