Senior AI-Native Systems Architect & Tech Lead

ServiceNow; Santa Clara (CA); Hybrid; USD 176,000 - 308,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health plans

401(k) with company match

ESPP

Matching donations

Flexible time away

Family leave programs

Job summary

ServiceNow in Santa Clara, CA is seeking a Staff Software Engineer (IC4) to lead the design, development, and delivery of complex AI-native and cloud-native systems. The IC4 engineer takes ownership of critical components, sets technical direction, and mentors peers across teams.

You will build AI/ML integrations, scalable data pipelines, and platform services using Python, Java, and JavaScript, contributing to platform improvements and ensuring production readiness.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience.
• 5+ years working with modern cloud-native and AI-native systems.
• 3+ years of hands‑on experience with LLM prompt engineering, agent design, and retrieval systems (RAG, semantic search, knowledge bases).
• 3+ years of experience integrating third‑party AI/ML services and platform APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Vertex AI).
• 2+ years of hands‑on experience developing applications on the ServiceNow platform.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and architecture of AI-native and cloud-native systems.
• Own end-to-end delivery of features from spec to production monitoring.
• Balance latency, cost, scalability, and model quality in decisions.
• Design testing and evaluation frameworks for AI features and guardrails.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to cross-team architectural discussions.
• Collaborate with product management and other engineering teams to define requirements.

Skills

LLM prompt engineering

Agent design

Retrieval systems (RAG)

Cloud-native architectures

Python/Java/JavaScript

Kubernetes & CI/CD

ServiceNow integration

Education

Bachelor's degree; 8+ years

Master's degree; 6+ years

PhD; 3+ years

Tools

Kubernetes

REST APIs

CI/CD pipelines

LangChain

Pinecone/Weaviate/pgvector

Job description

ServiceNow in Santa Clara, CA is seeking a Staff Software Engineer (IC4) to lead the design, development, and delivery of complex AI-native and cloud-native systems. The IC4 engineer takes ownership of critical components, sets technical direction, and mentors peers across teams.

You will build AI/ML integrations, scalable data pipelines, and platform services using Python, Java, and JavaScript, contributing to platform improvements and ensuring production readiness.