Senior Staff Research Engineer/Scientist

Servicenow; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 232,000 - 405,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health plans

401(k) Plan with company match

ESP P

Matching donations

Family leave programs

Job summary

ServiceNow in Santa Clara, CA is seeking a Staff Research Scientist to lead a major workstream in agent learning and recursive self-improvement. You will turn failures and successes into hypotheses, experiments, training signals, and deployable improvements to model weights and harness code.

This role blends scientific reasoning with training code, agent systems, and production constraints, requiring excellence in ML, distributed training, and collaboration with product and engineering teams to

Qualifications

• 10+ years of AI/ML research or engineering experience; PhD required.
• Proven ability to set technical direction and lead multiple high-impact projects across team boundaries.
• Strong foundations in ML, deep learning, reinforcement learning, and experimentation with large language or multimodal models.
• Advanced Python and PyTorch; experience modifying training code and data pipelines.
• Practical depth in agentic AI: tool use, planning, memory, retrieval, environments, or long-horizon execution.
• Experience with distributed training, rollout, or inference; modern post-training or serving stacks.
• Publications, shipped systems, patents, or open-source contributions.

Responsibilities

• Design and execute end-to-end research projects improving enterprise agents' capabilities across planning, reasoning, memory, tool use, retrieval, and coordination.
• Research post-training methods: continued pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, RL, DPO/GRPO, reward modeling, distillation.
• Develop harness-level optimization across prompts, tools, schemas, and memory management.
• Build improvement flywheels for data collection, trajectories, and signals; identify failure modes and interventions.
• Create realistic, stateful training environments and benchmarks with verifiers and graders.
• Run ablations and scaling experiments; reason about variance, distribution shift, and cost.
• Develop capabilities across modalities and multilingual settings.
• Build distributed pipelines for training, rollout, evaluation, and inference; optimize scale bottlenecks.
• Collaborate with researchers, engineering, and product to move validated methods to production.
• Communicate results through reviews, reports, publications, patents, and open-source contributions.

Skills

AI/ML research

Python

PyTorch

Distributed training

Research leadership

Agentic AI

Evaluation design

System design

Multimodal/ML models

Education

PhD or equivalent advanced degree

Tools

Research infrastructure

Experiment pipelines

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.

Job Description

About the team

Our Core AI Research team develops novel methods for enterprise agents that reason over multimodal information, use tools, take reliable action across stateful workflows, and improve through feedback. We work across LLM model post-training, agent harnesses, training environments, evaluations, ML, search and reasoning systems, partnering closely with product, engineering, infrastructure, security, and domain experts.

About the role

As a Staff Research Scientist, you will independently lead a major workstream in agent learning and recursive self-improvement. You will turn systematic failures and successful trajectories into hypotheses, experiments, training signals, and deployable improvements to model weights and/or the executable harness around the model.

This is a research role for someone who can move between scientific reasoning, training code, agent systems, and production constraints.

What you get to do in this role:

• Design and execute end-to-end research projects that improve long-horizon enterprise agents across planning, reasoning, memory, tool use, retrieval, computer use, multi-agent coordination, and verification.
• Research model post-training methods such as continued pretraining, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), RL, DPO/GRPO, reward modeling, and distillation.
• Research harness-level optimization across prompts and task framing, tool and schema design, skills, MCP-backed providers, subagents, context and memory management, agent-loop policy, and reliable verifiers.
• Build improvement flywheels that mine trajectories and production-safe signals, identify recurring failure modes, generate or curate data, propose interventions, and measure generalization before promotion.
• Create realistic, stateful training environments and benchmarks for enterprise workflows, with programmatic verifiers and calibrated human or model-based graders where deterministic grading is not possible.
• Run rigorous ablations and scaling experiments; reason explicitly about variance, contamination, reward hacking, distribution shift, cross-model transfer, cost, and latency.
• Develop capabilities across one or more modalities - language, documents, images/video, and speech/audio - and across multilingual or cross-lingual settings.
• Build reproducible distributed pipelines for training, rollout generation, evaluation, and inference; profile and resolve bottlenecks that only appear at scale.
• Partner with other researchers, engineering, and product teams to move validated methods into reliable enterprise systems.
• Communicate results through research reviews, technical reports, publications, patents, open-source contributions, and decision-ready recommendations.

Qualifications

To be successful in this role you have:

• 10+ years of relevant AI/ML research or engineering experience, or equivalent research depth and impact; PhD or other advanced degree required.
• Track record of setting technical direction and leading multiple ambiguous, high-impact research efforts across team boundaries.
• Strong foundations in machine learning, deep learning, reinforcement learning, and experimentation, with hands-on experience training or adapting large language or multimodal models.
• Advanced Python and PyTorch skills, including modifying training code, data pipelines, evaluators, or research infrastructure.
• Practical depth in agentic AI, including tool use, planning, memory, retrieval, environments, or long-horizon execution.
• Experience designing decision-useful evaluations using robust datasets, trajectory analysis, graders or verifiers, and error analysis.
• Experience with distributed training, rollout, or inference and modern post-training or serving stacks.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and evidence of research impact through publications, shipped systems, patents, benchmarks, or open source.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in multimodal, document AI, computer vision, speech/audio, or multilingual modeling.
• Experience with enterprise agents, stateful workflows, computer use, tool protocols, or simulation environments.
• Experience with synthetic data, model-generated feedback, automated experimentation, or search-based optimization.
• Experience operating distributed GPU and experiment infrastructure.

What success looks like

• You establish a portfolio of reproducible improvement loops for important enterprise-agent capabilities and deliver gains that generalize across tasks, domains, or models.
• You translate multiple validated research results into production or shared-platform improvements adopted across teams, supported by clear quality, reliability, cost, and safety evidence.
• You raise organization-wide research velocity and decision quality through reusable environments, evaluation infrastructure, methodology, and cross-team technical leadership.

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $231,500 - $405,100, 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

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.

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