SENIOR SERVICENOW ADMINISTRATOR - Platform Administration, Governance & Legacy Operations
Location United States - Hybrid
Time-zone coverage Must be located in Eastern or Mountain Time and available during the corresponding business hours
Role Overview
Highly experienced and process-oriented Senior ServiceNow Administrator to own day-to-day platform administration, controlled access management, upgrades and patching, installations, and operational support across current and legacy ServiceNow environments. Talent should have strong hands-on administration skills with broad knowledge of the ServiceNow ecosystem and a disciplined approach to governance, auditability, and production change control.
Key Responsibilities
Administer ServiceNow instances and maintain platform availability, stability, security, and operational readiness.
Plan, coordinate, execute, and validate ServiceNow patches, upgrades, hotfixes, and platform installations across non-production and production environments.
Manage user accounts, login credentials, roles, groups, authentication-related requests, and access provisioning in accordance with approved processes.
Enforce least-privilege access, segregation of duties, approval checkpoints, and strict guardrails for privileged and production access.
Maintain a complete, reviewable audit trail for access grants, access changes, elevated privileges, and production changes, including approvals and supporting evidence.
Administer change controls for production releases, configuration changes, emergency changes, rollback planning, validation, and post-implementation review.
Operate and support legacy ServiceNow platforms, including older configurations, integrations, customizations, and technical debt, while minimizing operational risk.
Assess compatibility and regression impacts before upgrades or changes, and coordinate testing, defect resolution, and readiness sign-off.
Monitor platform health, integrations, queues, logs, scheduled jobs, performance, and recurring issues; drive root-cause analysis and corrective actions.
Maintain platform documentation, standard operating procedures, runbooks, access matrices, change records, configuration inventories, and support knowledge.
Partner with security, audit, infrastructure, application, and business teams to ensure platform controls are consistently followed.
Required Technical Skills
Advanced ServiceNow administration, including user, group, role, credential, and access management.
Demonstrated experience with patching, upgrades, installations, environment refresh activities, release validation, and post-upgrade support.
Broad understanding of ServiceNow modules, with practical exposure to multiple areas such as ITSM, CMDB, ITOM, CSM, HRSD, ITAM, Service Catalog, Knowledge, Change Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, and Request Management.
Hands-on experience supporting legacy ServiceNow environments and dependencies created by older customizations, integrations, workflows, scripts, or plugins.
Working knowledge of roles, groups, ACLs, privileged access, authentication, audit logs, and controlled production access.
Experience with controlled deployments, release documentation, rollback planning, and production change evidence.
Ability to troubleshoot using logs, diagnostics, job history, integration monitoring, and structured problem-solving.
Process, Risk & Control Expectations
Highly process oriented, with the discipline to follow documented operating procedures and change-management requirements.
No production access or change without an appropriate request, review, approval, traceability, and evidence retention.
Conduct periodic access reviews and promptly remove or adjust access that is no longer required.
Ensure emergency access and emergency changes are time-bound, documented, approved, and retrospectively reviewed.
Maintain separation between development, testing, approval, and production implementation responsibilities wherever applicable.
Escalate control exceptions, policy deviations, security concerns, and production risks promptly and transparently.
Required Experience & Qualifications
Minimum 10 years of overall IT experience.
Minimum 5 years of hands-on experience with ServiceNow modules and administration activities.
Proven experience supporting enterprise-scale ServiceNow environments and business-critical production operations.
Experience operating within formal IT service management, change management, security, and audit processes.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, with clear documentation of decisions, controls, risks, and technical changes.
Must be based in the United States or Canada and located in Eastern or Mountain Time, with availability during the corresponding time-zone business hours.
Preferred Qualifications
ServiceNow Certified System Administrator (CSA).
Additional ServiceNow implementation or module certifications.
ITIL Foundation or higher certification.
Experience with platform governance, access reviews, compliance audits, regulated environments, or production-control frameworks.
Experience developing legacy-remediation, upgrade, or platform-modernization roadmaps.
