Senior Staff Software Engineer, Agentic Systems - Moveworks

ServiceNow, Inc.; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

ServiceNow, Inc. is hiring for a distributed systems engineer to build the runtime infrastructure powering Moveworks' AI agents.

You will own the agent orchestration, session management, and an event-driven pipeline handling real-time interactions and multi-LLM calls with low latency. You will design and operate systems that ensure correctness, observability, and resiliency at scale, using Python/Go, DynamoDB, Redis, SQS, Kafka, and gRPC.

Qualifications

• 12+ years building production backend/infrastructure systems.
• Strong in Python or Go (ideally both).
• Experience designing and operating systems that handle real traffic at scale.
• Comfort with ambiguity — novel problems without textbook solutions.

Responsibilities

• Develop and own the runtime infrastructure powering AI agents.
• Build agent orchestration and distributed session management components.
• Implement event-driven pipelines with SQS, Kafka, gRPC, and Socket.IO.
• Ensure observability with OpenTelemetry and tracing across components.
• Optimize for low latency and high reliability in real-time workloads.

Skills

Distributed systems

Concurrency/async programming

Event-driven architectures

Database systems

Observability

gRPC/protobuf

Tools

DynamoDB

Redis

SQS

Kafka

OpenTelemetry

gRPC

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.

The Role

We're building the runtime infrastructure that powers Moveworks' AI agents — the systems that orchestrate, execute, and deliver agent responses to millions of enterprise users in real time. This is not an ML role. This is a distributed systems engineering role at the heart of the agentic AI wave.

Our AI agents can plan, execute multi-step workflows, call tools, wait on human input, and resume — all while maintaining correctness, observability, and low latency. The systems that make this possible are what you'll build and own.

What you get to do in this role:

• Agent orchestration engine — A state machine that manages long-running agent sessions, coordinating planning, execution, and user interaction across multiple LLM calls and tool invocations

• Distributed session management — Lease-based ownership using DynamoDB conditional writes, heartbeat protocols, and crash recovery via checkpointing

• Event-driven message pipeline — SQS FIFO queues for ordered delivery, Kafka consumers for event processing, and real-time streaming via gRPC and Socket.IO

• Structured concurrency — Python asyncio TaskGroups running multiple concurrent tasks per session (message polling, lease heartbeats, output publishing, orchestrator execution) with fail-fast semantics and graceful cancellation

• Observability infrastructure — OpenTelemetry instrumentation, distributed trace context propagation across async boundaries, custom span lifecycle management for sessions that span minutes

• Caching and state layers — Redis, DynamoDB KV stores with per-org/per-bot scoping, batch read optimization, and hot-reload configuration

To be successful in this role you have:

You should have deep experience in at least 3 of these areas:

• Distributed systems: consistency models, idempotency, exactly-once delivery, distributed locking/leasing

• Concurrent/async programming: Python asyncio, Go goroutines, structured concurrency, cancellation handling

• Event-driven architectures: message queues (SQS, Kafka), pub/sub, backpressure, delivery guarantees

• Database systems for infrastructure: DynamoDB (conditional writes, transactions), Redis (connection pooling, pub/sub)

• Observability: OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, span context propagation, Prometheus metrics

• gRPC/protobuf: streaming RPCs, service interface design, error handling patterns

Required:

• 12+ years building production backend/infrastructure systems

• Strong in Python or Go (ideally both)

• Experience designing and operating systems that handle real traffic at scale

• Comfort with ambiguity — these are novel problems without textbook solutions

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 (https://careers.servicenow.com/life-at-servicenow#workpersonas) . 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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