Staff Software Engineer - Forecast Engine

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. You will own the Forecast Engine, the system that turns ServiceNow's cloud capacity and cost actuals into forward-looking forecasts, then automatically tracks those forecasts against plan and budget and alerts the right people when reality diverges. The Forecast Engine also feeds directly into our Future Capacity Reservation (FCR) automation: its forecast of fleet growth and workload migration timing is the signal that drives how much hyperscaler capacity to reserve, in which providers and regions, and when, against the lead-time windows FinOps and Cloud Operations plan around. Role The Forecast Engine is the simulation and automation core behind FinOps capacity and cost planning. It reads forecasting actuals from the lakehouse and runs a deterministic multi-period simulation of fleet growth, workload migration, placement, and sizing. It validates each result against hard invariants and publishes forecasts that data scientists, analysts, and FinOps engineers consume in Lightdash. Today it is a fast, single-binary Rust core with a streaming Trino read and an Iceberg publish path. The next chapter is to turn that engine into an automated, always-on forecasting service. As our Staff Software Engineer for the Forecast Engine, you will design and build the automation layer around the engine: scheduled forecast runs, variance and budget tracking against plan, anomaly and threshold alerting, first-class integration with planning systems, Splunk, and the broader observability stack, and the handoff that turns forecasts into Future Capacity Reservation (FCR) recommendations. You will make the forecast a living signal: recomputed on a cadence, reconciled against actuals, and translated into the capacity reservations that keep hyperscaler supply ahead of demand. This role demands speed and high velocity. You will take a proven simulation core and rapidly make it a dependable, observable, self-monitoring product that the organization plans against, shipping working increments fast and iterating in tight loops. The automation layer around the engine is greenfield: you will build it from the ground up. We operate like a small startup, and this is the operating mode of the role and the department: we move quickly, deliver early, keep process light, and keep momentum. What You'll Do: Core Responsibilities Design and develop scalable, maintainable, and reusable software components with a strong emphasis on performance, determinism, and reliability. Collaborate with product managers and FinOps partners to translate planning and budgeting requirements into well-architected solutions, owning features from design through delivery. Build intuitive and extensible interfaces for forecast consumption (Lightdash models, alert payloads, and APIs) ensuring flexibility for finance and capacity-planning use cases. Contribute to the design and implementation of new Forecast Engine capabilities while enhancing existing simulation, validation, and publish paths. Integrate automated testing into development workflows to ensure consistent quality across releases, including determinism (byte-identical output) and forecast-accuracy regression checks. Participate in design and code reviews ensuring best practices in performance, maintainability, and testability. Develop comprehensive test strategies covering functional, regression, integration, and accuracy aspects (period-over-period identity, backtest grading against real actuals). Foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement by sharing best practices in engineering and quality. Promote a cultu