Senior ML Engineering Lead – AI Search & Retrieval

ServiceNow; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous family leave

Matched donations

Annual learning stipends

Flexible PTO

Competitive retirement plan

Paid volunteer time

Job summary

ServiceNow is seeking a senior leader to build and scale a team of engineers focused on AI-powered search and retrieval systems. You will drive strategy for ranking, personalization, and RAG, partnering with product and architecture teams to deliver innovative experiences.

You will mentor managers and engineers, lead production ML deployments, and shape the platform for reliability and performance across enterprise content. Strong IR expertise and distributed systems experience are essential.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering or 3+ years in engineering management, with leadership of ML/AI teams.
• Hands-on experience with search technologies such as Lucene, Elasticsearch, Solr, OpenSearch, Algolia, Coveo, Glean, or similar.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of software engineers and machine learning engineers building large-scale AI search and retrieval systems.
• Drive strategy, architecture, and execution for search, ranking, relevance, personalization, and RAG capabilities.
• Partner with product managers and architects to define and deliver AI-powered experiences.
• Build scalable retrieval pipelines leveraging vector search, semantic search, ranking models, and LLMs.
• Improve relevance, precision, recall, and overall search quality across content sources.
• Establish architectural patterns for highly available, resilient, and performant distributed systems.
• Lead production deployment of ML models and retrieval services at enterprise scale.
• Drive reliability, observability, and performance optimization across the platform.
• Mentor engineering leaders and contributors, fostering collaboration and technical excellence.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies with stakeholders to accelerate adoption into products.
• Balance short-term delivery with long-term technical investments and platform evolution.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Distributed systems

Information retrieval

Java or Python

ML deployment

RAG architectures

Cross-functional collaboration

Cloud-native architectures

Performance optimization

Vector databases

Embedding frameworks

Knowledge retrieval

SaaS products

Distributed teams

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

Equivalent experience

Tools

Lucene/Elasticsearch/Solr/OpenSearch (IR stacks)

Algolia

Coveo

Glean

Vector databases

LLMs embeddings

Job description

ServiceNow is seeking a senior leader to build and scale a team of engineers focused on AI-powered search and retrieval systems. You will drive strategy for ranking, personalization, and RAG, partnering with product and architecture teams to deliver innovative experiences.

You will mentor managers and engineers, lead production ML deployments, and shape the platform for reliability and performance across enterprise content. Strong IR expertise and distributed systems experience are essential.