Head of ML Engineering – AI Search & Retrieval

Servicenow; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 191,000 - 334,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health plans

401(k) Plan with company match

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Matching donations

Job summary

ServiceNow in Santa Clara, CA is seeking a Senior Manager of Machine Learning Engineering to lead a team building the next generation of AI Search and Retrieval capabilities powering intelligent experiences across the ServiceNow platform.

You will guide engineers and ML practitioners responsible for scalable search, retrieval, ranking, and RAG systems that help users discover information and accomplish work more effectively, while collaborating with Product, Platform, UX, and Quality teams.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience with a Bachelor's degree, or 10+ years with a Master's degree.
• 3+ years of engineering management experience leading high-performing technical teams.
• Strong expertise in Java or Python and large-scale distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with search technologies such as Lucene, Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch, Algolia, Coveo, Glean, or similar platforms.
• Experience building and operating large-scale retrieval, ranking, recommendation, or search systems.
• Experience with modern AI/ML technologies, including LLMs, embeddings, vector databases, and RAG architectures.
• Strong understanding of information retrieval, search relevance, ranking algorithms, and semantic search.
• Experience deploying and operating machine learning models in production environments.
• Knowledge of cloud-native architectures, microservices, observability, and performance optimization.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills with the ability to influence across engineering and product organizations.
• Proven track record of delivering innovative products from concept through production at enterprise scale.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of software engineers and machine learning engineers building large-scale AI Search and retrieval systems.
• Drive the strategy, architecture, and execution for Search, Ranking, Relevance, Personalization, and RAG capabilities.
• Partner with Product Managers and architects to define and deliver innovative AI-powered experiences.
• Build scalable retrieval pipelines leveraging vector search, semantic search, ranking models, and large language models.
• Improve relevance, precision, recall, and overall search quality across structured and unstructured enterprise content.
• Establish architectural patterns for highly available, resilient, and performant distributed systems.
• Lead the development and production deployment of machine learning models and retrieval services at enterprise scale.
• Drive operational excellence, reliability, observability, and performance optimization across the platform.
• Mentor engineering leaders and individual contributors while fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and technical excellence.
• Partner with cross-functional stakeholders to evaluate emerging AI technologies and accelerate their adoption into customer-facing products.
• Balance short-term delivery goals with long-term technical investments and platform evolution.

Skills

Java

Python

Distributed systems

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

Tools

Lucene

Elasticsearch

Solr

OpenSearch

Algolia

Coveo

Glean

Job description

ServiceNow in Santa Clara, CA is seeking a Senior Manager of Machine Learning Engineering to lead a team building the next generation of AI Search and Retrieval capabilities powering intelligent experiences across the ServiceNow platform.

You will guide engineers and ML practitioners responsible for scalable search, retrieval, ranking, and RAG systems that help users discover information and accomplish work more effectively, while collaborating with Product, Platform, UX, and Quality teams.