Principal AI Forward Deployed Engineer

SmartRecruiters, Inc.; Santa Clara, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 221,000 - 387,000; Full time

Job summary

ServiceNow is seeking a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer for the CRM & Industry Engineering group. You will lead the technical direction, design agentic AI solutions, and work directly with customers to deliver production-ready outcomes.

You will set architecture standards, guide deployment patterns, and ensure safe, reliable operations while mentoring engineers and scaling impact across engagements.

Qualifications

• Experience designing, deploying, and operating production software and AI solutions in customer-facing settings.
• Autonomy to set multi-engagement technical strategy and architecture standards.

Responsibilities

• Analyze customer use cases and translate them into agentic AI use cases with measurable outcomes.
• Architect agentic AI solutions on the ServiceNow platform, including workflows and integrations.
• Deploy solutions into production and validate behavior against customer intent.
• Define technical direction and reusable patterns for the FDE group across engagements.
• Serve as trusted technical advisor in customer conversations, communicating capabilities and risks.
• Ensure security, reliability, and monitoring with rollback for production deployments.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across the FDE group.
• Feed learnings back into product and engineering to improve the platform.

Skills

Customer-facing delivery

Agentic AI

Solution architecture

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

ServiceNow platform

CRM & Industry domain

Job 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.

Job Description

This is a rare chance to lead the technical direction of one of the fastest-growing, most strategic businesses at ServiceNow. CRM & Industry Workflows is where the company is investing to win, and agentic AI is at the center of that bet- reshaping how customers run sales automation, CPQ, customer service, and field service. As Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, you are the lead architect for the FDE group within CRM & Industry Engineering: the person who turns that ambition into working solutions in front of real customers.

This is a customer-facing engineering role. You work directly with ServiceNow customers to analyze their business and AI use cases, design agentic solutions on the ServiceNow platform, and deploy them into production. As the most senior technical member of the group, you set the solution architecture and deployment patterns the FDE team reuses across engagements, and you own the correctness, reliability, and business outcomes of the agentic systems the group delivers. Your work compounds: the patterns you establish are adopted across a growing team and a growing customer base, and your influence extends back into the ServiceNow platform itself.

The role rewards proximity to the customer and soundness of judgment over volume of code. Agentic solutions behave probabilistically rather than deterministically, so value concentrates in framing the right use cases, designing solutions that hold up in production, and verifying that autonomous behavior matches customer intent. You will spend more time with customers - in discovery, solutioning, and deployment - than on any other activity, and you will raise the whole group's ability to do the same. For a senior engineer who wants to shape an emerging discipline, build a team's technical foundation, and see their impact scale with the business, the growth runway is significant.

What you get in this role:

• Analyze customer use cases. Work directly with customer business and technical teams to understand their processes, data, and goals across sales automation, CPQ, customer service, and field service, and translate ambiguous problem statements into well-scoped agentic AI use cases with clear success criteria.
• Architect the solution. Design agentic AI solutions on the ServiceNow platform - agent workflows, tool and system integrations, data and context design, and guardrails - that fit cleanly into the customer's existing landscape and deliver measurable outcomes.
• Deploy into production. Own the path from design to live deployment: build and configure the solution, integrate with customer systems, validate behavior against intent, and shepherd it through the customer's environment into production use.
• Set the technical strategy and standards for the group. Define the multi-engagement technical direction, reference architectures, reusable deployment patterns, and solution accelerators the FDE team applies across customers, so successful engagements scale rather than being rebuilt each time.
• Be the customer's trusted technical advisor. Serve as the senior engineering voice in customer conversations - from working sessions to executive discussions - clearly communicating what agentic AI can and cannot do, the tradeoffs involved, and how to adopt it responsibly.
• Verify quality, reliability, and safety. Confirm that deployed agents are correct, secure, and reliable: validate edge cases and failure modes, guard against risks such as prompt injection and data leakage, and put monitoring and rollback in place for behavioral drift in production.
• Lead the FDE group technically. Provide architectural direction, review, and mentorship across the group's engagements, unblocking the hardest technical problems and raising the overall standard of solutioning and delivery.
• Close the loop with product and engineering. Feed field learnings - recurring use cases, gaps, and platform friction - back into ServiceNow product and engineering to improve the platform for CRM & Industry customers at large.

Qualifications

To be successful in this role you have:

A demonstrated track record of designing, deploying, and operating production software and AI solutions in customer-facing settings, with clear evidence of leading complex engagements to successful business outcomes. As a Principal Engineer, this person is a recognized technical authority who is highly autonomous: they set the multi-engagement technical strategy and architecture standards the FDE group follows, drive their own agenda in alignment with org goals, navigate organizational ambiguity confidently, and coach senior engineers.

• Customer-facing solution delivery. Extensive experience working directly with customers to analyze needs, architect solutions, and deploy them to production - in a forward-deployed, professional services, solution architecture, or comparable delivery role.
• Agentic AI and applied ML. Hands-on experience designing and operating autonomous agent systems - planning, tool invocation, memory, context design, and guardrails - and a working command of the LLM behavior, evaluation, and failure modes needed to reason about and verify agentic solutions in production. This is not an AI research or foundation-model role.
• ServiceNow platform and CRM & Industry domain. Knowledge of the ServiceNow platform and the CRM & Industry domains this role serves - sales automation, CPQ, customer service, and field service - is preferred but not mandatory.
• Solution architecture and integration. Expert-level system design makes sound architecture and sequencing decisions under uncertainty, designs end-to-end solutions across systems and data, and judges what to build, buy, or configure to meet the outcome. Defines architectural patterns that hold across multiple customer engagements.
• Verification, security, and reliability. A disciplined, skeptical eye for whether output meets intent, plus working knowledge of the security and reliability risks specific to AI-integrated systems and how to control them with concrete, least-privilege practices, monitoring, and rollback.
• Customer engagement and communication. Excellent communication and stakeholder skills — able to run discovery and working sessions, influence customer technical and executive audiences, and clearly convey capabilities, limitations, tradeoffs, and risk.
• Technical leadership. A record of leading and coaching engineers — including senior engineers — setting reusable technical standards across teams and elevating the delivery capability of a group rather than only individual output.
• Education. Bachelor's degree in computer science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. Advanced degrees or relevant certifications are a plus but do not substitute for demonstrated ability to deliver reliable AI solutions to customers.
• Years of Experience. 15 years of related experience with a bachelor's degree in computer science; or 12 years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with 8 years' experience; or equivalent experience. Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. Advanced degrees or relevant certifications are a plus but are not a substitute for demonstrated ability to ship reliable software with AI-native practices.

What you can expect: a front-row seat in ServiceNow's fastest-growing, most strategic business, direct access to senior customers and executives, and the room to define how agentic AI gets deployed at scale. The technical foundation and the team you build here grow with the business - and so does your impact and career.

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $221,200 - $387,100, plus equity (when applicable), variable/incentive compensation and benefits. Sales positions generally offer a competitive On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive compensation structure. Please note that the base pay shown is a guideline, and individual total compensation will vary based on factors such as qualifications, skill level, competencies, and work location. We also offer health plans, including flexible spending accounts, a 401(k) Plan with company match, ESPP, matching donations, a flexible time away plan and family leave programs. Compensation is based on the geographic location in which the role is located and is subject to change based on work location.

Additional Information

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.

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