ServiceNow Platform Consultant — Self-Hosted (On-Premise) Installation & Upgrades

Location / model

Offshore (India), working through the bank’s secure remote access. Must be able to travel to Cairo for the production and DR build and the DR failover test if the bank requires on-site work. Arabic speakers, are a plus.

Certifications

ServiceNow Certified System Administrator (must); Red Hat RHCSA or equivalent Linux certification (must); RHCE, ITIL v4 Foundation, a PostgreSQL certification (nice).

Role summary

Owns the ServiceNow platform itself, below the applications: designs, installs, hardens and hands over a self-hosted ServiceNow deployment in a bank’s data centres, and then keeps it current through patches and family-release upgrades. Works from ServiceNow’s self-hosted reference architecture, alongside the Solution Architect and the Database Engineer, and is the person the bank’s infrastructure, network and security teams deal with day to day.

Key responsibilities

- Run the platform design and sizing with ServiceNow and the bank: application nodes, database tier, load balancer, network tiers, storage; produce the infrastructure request and the platform HLD/LLD.
- Install and configure ServiceNow application nodes in six environments on bank-provided Linux virtual machines, behind the bank’s load balancer, with TLS certificates from the bank CA.
- Build high availability and disaster recovery: clustered application nodes, standby environment in the DR data centre kept on the same release, and a documented, tested failover and failback.
- Configure backup and restore with the bank’s backup platform, and prove it with a restore test before go-live.
- Harden operating systems and application nodes to CIS benchmarks and the bank’s security baseline; close findings from the bank’s vulnerability scans and penetration test.
- Plan and execute patches and family-release upgrades across all environments: pre-upgrade checks, sub-production first,



rollback plan, upgrade of MID Servers, post-upgrade validation with the application team.
- Refresh sub-production environments from production (manual clone by backup and restore) with data anonymisation where required.
- Monitor platform health (node performance, logs, queues, database growth) and tune it; integrate host monitoring with the bank’s tools.
- Write the operations runbooks (start/stop, failover, backup/restore, patching, upgrade) and train the bank’s infrastructure team to use them.

Must-have

- 6+ years in infrastructure or platform engineering, including 3+ years on ServiceNow platform administration.
- At least one end-to-end self-hosted (on-premise) ServiceNow installation, and at least two family-release upgrades of a self-hosted instance, done hands-on.
- Strong Red Hat Enterprise Linux administration: users and services, storage, networking, patching, shell scripting.
- Working knowledge of the ServiceNow node architecture (UI and worker nodes, clustering, system properties, upgrade engine) and of MID Server installation and upgrade.
- Experience with load balancers (F5 or similar), TLS/certificates, firewalls and network segmentation in a multi-tier deployment.
- Database fundamentals on the engines ServiceNow runs on self-hosted (PostgreSQL-based Raptor DB, MariaDB or Oracle): connectivity, replication concepts, backup and restore, enough to work with the Database Engineer.
- Experience in a regulated environment with change control, maintenance windows and audit evidence; explicit written English for runbooks and design documents.

Nice-to-have (strengthens the bid)

- Banking / BFSI or government self-hosted ServiceNow experience, especially in MENA or the GCC.
- Hands-on Raptor DB or PostgreSQL administration (could then also cover the Database Engineer role).
- Automation with Ansible or similar; VMware administration; experience with CyberArk or another PAM for privileged access.
- ServiceNow CIS-Discovery or ITOM exposure, useful for Phase 2; Arabic language.

📌 ServiceNow Platform Consultant — Self-Hosted Installation & Upgrades (India)
🏢 AvanteNow
📍 India