Staff AI-Native Platform Engineer

ServiceNow; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 176,000 - 308,000; Full time

Job summary

ServiceNow is hiring a Staff Software Engineer in Santa Clara, CA, Hybrid. You will lead design and delivery of AI-native systems, owning critical components and guiding peers.

Expect balance of technical depth with organizational impact across architecture, security, and production readiness. You will mentor engineers, review prompts and AI behavior, and collaborate with product, data, and platform teams to drive improvements and reliable performance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience with a Bachelor's degree; OR 6+ years with a Master's; OR 3+ years with a PhD; OR equivalent work 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 and extensions on the ServiceNow platform
• Proficiency in JavaScript/GlideScript, Python, and Java; familiarity with ServiceNow scripting patterns and APIs

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and architecture of complex, production-critical AI-native systems, including LLM integrations, agentic workflows, retrieval pipelines, and inference services
• Own end-to-end delivery of medium-to-large features or systems, including specification, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and production monitoring
• Make informed architectural and technical trade-off decisions between latency, cost, scalability, reliability, and model quality
• Establish evaluation frameworks, testing strategies, and production monitoring for AI-driven features; drive adoption of eval-driven development practices
• Design and optimize high-performance data pipelines, embedding systems, and vector stores handling millions of rows and complex retrieval scenarios
• Champion security best practices, including prompt-injection defense, data privacy, PII handling, responsible AI guardrails, and compliance with regulatory requirements
• Participate in architectural reviews across teams and contribute to platform-level technical decisions
• Stay current with emerging AI/ML frameworks, services, and techniques; evaluate and recommend adoption where applicable
• Mentor junior engineers (IC2/IC3) through pair programming, design reviews, architecture discussions, and hands-on coaching
• Conduct thorough code reviews, including evaluation of prompts, agent logic, retrieval strategies, and AI/model behavior validation
• Identify technical debt and improvement opportunities; advocate for and lead initiatives to address them
• Share knowledge through documentation, brown-bag sessions, and architectural guidance
• Contribute to hiring and interview processes; provide technical assessment and feedback on engineering candidates
• Model best practices in software craftsmanship, testing discipline, and debugging methodology
• Support onboarding of new team members and ensure knowledge transfer across projects
• Work closely with product management, domain specialists, and other engineering teams to define requirements and technical specifications
• Translate complex technical concepts and AI trade-offs for non-technical stakeholders
• Lead root cause analysis for customer-reported issues, including model behavior and retrieval quality
• Participate in design reviews, technical planning sessions, and retrospectives
• Communicate clearly about design decisions and production incidents
• Build and maintain relationships with adjacent teams and external partners
• Proactively identify opportunities to improve development processes, tooling, and team efficiency
• Develop robust, maintainable AI-native software using Python, Java, and JavaScript as appropriate
• Build comprehensive unit tests, integration tests, and AI evaluation harnesses
• Troubleshoot distributed systems, probabilistic models, and cloud infrastructure; isolate root causes efficiently
• Implement secure coding practices and responsible AI guardrails
• Manage deployment, monitoring, and iteration of features in production; respond to performance issues
• Work with cloud services (AWS/GCP/Azure), managed AI services (Bedrock, Vertex AI, Azure OpenAI), Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines
• Contribute to code and architecture standards; ensure adherence to best practices
• Design and develop custom applications, extensions, and integrations on the ServiceNow platform
• Develop workflows, business rules, and automation using ServiceNow scripting (JavaScript, GlideScript, REST APIs)
• Build data models, forms, and dashboards for ServiceNow applications; optimize database queries for performance
• Integrate third‑party AI/ML services and custom APIs with ServiceNow platform services
• Contribute to and maintain ServiceNow plugin and app architecture; follow best practices
• Participate in ServiceNow upgrades and configuration management; ensure compatibility with platform updates
• Mentor junior engineers on ServiceNow platform capabilities and development patterns
• Participate in customer issue triage and root cause analysis for production ServiceNow application issues
• Work closely with customer success and support teams to understand and resolve complex technical issues
• Provide technical guidance to customers on application usage, configuration, and troubleshooting
• Identify patterns in customer issues and drive improvements to prevent recurrence
• Contribute to customer documentation and internal knowledge bases
• Support customer escalations; provide timely resolutions to critical issues
• Gather customer feedback and communicate product improvement opportunities back to product management

Skills

JavaScript/GlideScript

Python

Java

Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

LangChain

Vector databases

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

PhD

Tools

Weaviate

Pinecone

AWS/GCP/Azure

REST APIs

Job description

ServiceNow is hiring a Staff Software Engineer in Santa Clara, CA, Hybrid. You will lead design and delivery of AI-native systems, owning critical components and guiding peers.

Expect balance of technical depth with organizational impact across architecture, security, and production readiness. You will mentor engineers, review prompts and AI behavior, and collaborate with product, data, and platform teams to drive improvements and reliable performance.