Senior Applied Research Scientist

ServiceNow; Toronto; Hybrid; CAD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Applied Research Scientist to own significant parts of the agent harness, enabling AI agents to reason over real enterprise data and operate safely at Fortune 500 scale. You’ll own orchestration, context management, and tool invocation across multi-step workflows.

You will lead reliability, observability, and prompt infrastructure, ensuring stable model updates and cost-efficient production AI.

Qualifications

• 4+ years building production software systems with reliability and performance focus.
• Hands-on experience shipping generative AI products used by production users.
• Deep understanding of large language models, failure modes, and prompt shaping at scale.
• Practical prompt engineering experience with versioning and evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the agent execution harness and orchestration layer.
• Own runtime reliability, latency, and throughput for enterprise workflows.
• Instrument observability with tracing and cost attribution.
• Develop prompt management systems and evaluation frameworks.
• Integrate with frontier LLMs and manage model routing and cost tradeoffs.
• Provide technical leadership and codify design standards across the team.
• Define boundaries of agent logic and tool interactions within production.

Skills

Production software

Reliability engineering

AI systems

Eval engineering

LLM integration

System design

Startup environment

Prompt engineering

Tools

LangChain

LlamaIndex

Cloud observability tooling

Job description

Company Description

It all started when engineer Fred Luddy wrote code that automated a tedious task for his coworker, Phyllis. She cried tears of joy. That moment inspired Fred to build a company that could do that for everyone—freeing people from busywork so they could focus on meaningful work. Today, ServiceNow is the AI control tower for business reinvention. Our ServiceNow AI platform brings together any AI, any data, and any workflow— helping 85% of the Fortune 500® work smarter, faster, and better. We’re building an AI‑native culture where technology and talent are unstoppable together. And we’re just getting started. Join us to put AI to work for people.

About the Team

The Agentic Engineering org at ServiceNow is the customer‑obsessed engineering group that builds a conversational AI experience that turns enterprise intent into completed work. We advance how enterprise AI reasons, remembers, and executes. The Agent Orchestration team — the team you’ll join — owns the execution core: the agent harness, orchestration runtime, multi‑agent coordination, memory management, and the evaluation frameworks that ensure agents behave correctly in production. Every autonomous action Otto promises depends on what this team ships. By joining our team, you’ll be at the forefront of our AI transformation journey, backed by the global scale of ServiceNow and the agility of a high‑growth environment. We are looking for world‑class talent to help us extend agentic AI to every employee across every corner of the business.

What You’ll Do

As a Senior Applied Research Scientist, you will own significant parts of the agent harness — the infrastructure layer that enables AI agents to reason over real enterprise data, take action across workflows, and run safely at Fortune 500 scale.

• Harness engineering: Design and build the agent execution harness — the orchestration layer that routes inputs, manages context, invokes tools, handles retries, and surfaces execution state across multi‑step agentic workflows
• Reliability at scale: Own the runtime's fault tolerance, latency, and throughput; design for enterprise workflows that cannot fail silently or non‑deterministically
• Observability: Instrument the harness with tracing, cost attribution, and latency visibility so the team can reason about agent behavior in production and catch failures before customers do
• Prompt infrastructure: Build prompt management systems — versioning, templating, and systematic evaluation — that keep agent behavior stable across model updates and configuration changes
• Eval engineering: Design and own evaluation frameworks (unit evals, integration evals, production monitors) that measure agent quality, catch regressions, and drive data‑informed decisions
• LLM integration: Integrate with and abstract over frontier LLMs, managing model routing, fallback strategies, cost and latency tradeoffs in production
• Technical leadership: Raise the technical bar through architecture decisions, code reviews, and coaching — particularly on agentic design patterns and production AI discipline.
• System boundary design: Define where agent logic lives — what's a tool call, a sub‑agent, a hardcoded path, or a human escalation — and establish those design standards across the team

Qualifications

To be successful in this role you have:

• 4+ years building production software systems with a strong track record on reliability, performance, and scalability
• Hands‑on experience shipping generative AI products — not just integrating LLM APIs or building prototypes, but owning AI‑powered features that production users depend on
• Solid depth in how large language models work: failure modes, context constraints, and how prompt design shapes model behavior at scale
• Practical prompt engineering experience: systematically designing, versioning, and evaluating prompts across model updates or A/B evaluation cycles
• A real track record in eval engineering — not just familiarity, but a portfolio of evaluation suites designed, shipped, and used to drive quality decisions in production AI systems
• Cost and efficiency awareness at the system level: experience reasoning about model routing, inference cost, and latency tradeoffs in production
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: distributed systems, API design, and testing discipline
• Comfort operating in fast‑moving, ambiguous, startup‑like AI product environments

Nice to Have

• Experience with multi‑agent coordination patterns (A2A, MCP)
• Familiarity with agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar)
• Prior experience shipping AI systems in enterprise software
• Experience with AI observability tooling (tracing, cost tracking, LLM‑specific monitoring)
• Familiarity with cloud‑native infrastructure, service observability, logging, monitoring, reliability engineering, and production troubleshooting

Work Personas

We approach our distributed world of work with flexibility and trust. Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are categories that are assigned to ServiceNow employees depending on the nature of their work and their assigned work location. Learn more here. To determine eligibility for a work persona, ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow office using a third‑party service.

Equal Opportunity Employer

ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or any other category protected by law. In addition, all qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with legal requirements.

Accommodations

We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are unable to use this online application and need an alternative method to apply, please contact [e-mail] for assistance.

Export Control Regulations

For positions requiring access to controlled technology subject to export control regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (EAR), ServiceNow may be required to obtain export control approval from government authorities for certain individuals. All employment is contingent upon ServiceNow obtaining any export license or other approval that may be required by relevant export control authorities.