Staff AI Engineer - Conversational & Agentic AI

ServiceNow; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 176,100 - 308,200; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health plans

401(k) Plan with company match

Flexible time away plan

Family leave programs

Job summary

ServiceNow is looking for a Staff AI Engineer to join our Agent Orchestration team in Santa Clara, California. You'll own parts of our agent execution harness and be responsible for ensuring the infrastructure supports enterprise AI at scale.

The ideal candidate has over 7 years of experience, hands-on with generative AI products, deeply understands large language models, and excels in prompt engineering and evaluation frameworks. This role offers a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in building production software systems.
• Hands-on experience in shipping generative AI products.
• Solid understanding of large language models and their behavior.
• Practical experience in designing and evaluating prompts.
• Experience in eval engineering and quality decision making.
• Cost and efficiency awareness at the system level.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals in distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Own significant parts of the agent harness infrastructure.
• Design and build the agent execution harness and orchestration layer.
• Own the runtime’s fault tolerance, latency, and throughput.
• Instrument harness with tracing, cost attribution, and visibility.
• Build prompt management systems for stable agent behavior.
• Design evaluation frameworks for agent quality and decision making.
• Integrate with frontier LLMs for production optimization.
• Set technical standards and coach team members.

Skills

Reliability

Performance

Scalability

Prompt engineering

Eval engineering

Software engineering fundamentals

Tools

AI observability tooling

Cloud-native infrastructure

Job description

About the Team

The Agentic Engineering organization at ServiceNow is the customer‑obsessed engineering group that builds a conversational AI experience that turns enterprise intent into completed work. We advance how enterprise AI reasons, remembers, and executes.

The Agent Orchestration team — the team you’ll join — owns the execution core: the agent harness, orchestration runtime, multi‑agent coordination, memory management, and the evaluation frameworks that ensure agents behave correctly in production. Every autonomous action Otto promises depends on what this team ships.

By joining our team, you’ll be at the forefront of our AI transformation journey, backed by the global scale of ServiceNow and the agility of a high‑growth environment. We are looking for world‑class talent to help us extend agentic AI to every employee across every corner of the business.

What you get to do in this role

As a Staff AI Engineer, you will own significant parts of the agent harness — the infrastructure layer that enables AI agents to reason over real enterprise data, take action across workflows, and run safely at Fortune 500 scale.

• Harness engineering: Design and build the agent execution harness — the orchestration layer that routes inputs, manages context, invokes tools, handles retries, and surfaces execution state across multi‑step agentic workflows.
• Reliability at scale: Own the runtime’s fault tolerance, latency, and throughput; design for enterprise workflows that cannot fail silently or unpredictably.
• Observability: Instrument the harness with tracing, cost attribution, and latency visibility so the team can reason about agent behavior in production and catch failures before customers do.
• Prompt infrastructure: Build prompt management systems — versioning, templating, and systematic evaluation — that keep agent behavior stable across model updates and configuration changes.
• Eval engineering: Design and own evaluation frameworks (unit evals, integration evals, production monitors) that measure agent quality, catch regressions, and drive data‑informed decisions.
• LLM integration: Integrate with and abstract over frontier LLMs, managing model routing, fallback strategies, cost, and latency trade‑offs in production.
• Technical leadership: Set technical standards through architecture decisions, code reviews, and coaching — particularly on agentic design patterns and production AI discipline.
• System boundary design: Define where agent logic lives — what’s a tool call, a sub‑agent, a hardcoded path, or a human escalation — and establish those design standards across the team.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building production software systems with a strong track record on reliability, performance, and scalability.

• Hands‑on experience shipping generative AI products — not just integrating LLM APIs or building prototypes, but owning AI‑powered features that production users depend on.

• Solid depth in how large language models work: failure modes, context constraints, and how prompt design shapes model behavior at scale.

• Practical prompt engineering experience: systematically designing, versioning, and evaluating prompts across model updates or A/B evaluation cycles.

• A real track record in eval engineering — not just familiarity, but a portfolio of evaluation suites designed, shipped, and used to drive quality decisions in production AI systems.

• Cost and efficiency awareness at the system level: experience reasoning about model routing, inference cost, and latency tradeoffs in production.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: distributed systems, API design, and testing discipline.

• Comfort operating in fast‑moving, ambiguous, startup‑like AI product environments.

• Nice to Have

• Experience with multi‑agent coordination patterns (A2A, MCP).

• Familiarity with agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar).

• Prior experience shipping AI systems in enterprise software.

• Experience with AI observability tooling (tracing, cost tracking, LLM‑specific monitoring).

• Familiarity with cloud‑native infrastructure, service observability, logging, monitoring, reliability engineering, and production troubleshooting.

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $176,100 - $308,200 , 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.

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.