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Salary: USD 221,200 - 387,100 / annual
ServiceNow is seeking a Principal AI Forward Deployed Engineer to lead the technical direction of its fastest-growing business: CRM & Industry Workflows powered by agentic AI. This is a customer-facing engineering role where you will work directly with ServiceNow customers to analyze their business and AI use cases, design agentic solutions on the ServiceNow platform, and deploy them into production.
As the most senior technical member of the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) group within CRM & Industry Engineering, you will set the solution architecture and deployment patterns the team reuses across engagements. You own the correctness, reliability, and business outcomes of the agentic systems the group delivers. Your work compounds: the patterns you establish are adopted across a growing team and customer base, and your influence extends back into the ServiceNow platform itself.
Key responsibilities include:
- Analyze customer use cases across sales automation, CPQ, customer service, and field service to translate ambiguous problem statements into well-scoped agentic AI use cases with clear success criteria
- Architect agentic AI solutions on the ServiceNow platform, including agent workflows, tool and system integrations, data and context design, and guardrails
- Own the path from design to live deployment: build, configure, integrate with customer systems, validate behavior against intent, and shepherd solutions into production
- Define multi-engagement technical direction, reference architectures, reusable deployment patterns, and solution accelerators for the FDE team
- Serve as the senior engineering voice in customer conversations, clearly communicating what agentic AI can and cannot do, tradeoffs, and responsible adoption
- Verify that deployed agents are correct, secure, and reliable; validate edge cases and failure modes; guard against risks such as prompt injection and data leakage; implement monitoring and rollback for behavioral drift
- Provide architectural direction, review, and mentorship across the group's engagements, unblocking hard technical problems and raising overall solutioning standards
- Feed field learnings—recurring use cases, gaps, and platform friction—back into ServiceNow product and engineering
The role rewards proximity to the customer and soundness of judgment over volume of code. You will spend more time with customers in discovery, solutioning, and deployment than on any other activity, and will raise the whole group's ability to do the same.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Demonstrated track record of designing, deploying, and operating production software and AI solutions in customer-facing settings, with clear evidence of leading complex engagements to successful business outcomes
- Extensive experience working directly with customers to analyze needs, architect solutions, and deploy them to production (forward-deployed, professional services, solution architecture, or comparable delivery role)
- Hands-on experience designing and operating autonomous agent systems—planning, tool invocation, memory, context design, and guardrails—with working command of LLM behavior, evaluation, and failure modes needed to reason about and verify agentic solutions in production
- Expert-level system design: makes sound architecture and sequencing decisions under uncertainty, designs end-to-end solutions across systems and data, judges what to build/buy/configure to meet outcomes, defines architectural patterns that hold across multiple customer engagements
- Disciplined, skeptical eye for whether output meets intent; working knowledge of security and reliability risks specific to AI-integrated systems and how to control them with concrete, least-privilege practices, monitoring, and rollback
- Excellent communication and stakeholder skills: able to run discovery and working sessions, influence customer technical and executive audiences, clearly convey capabilities, limitations, tradeoffs, and risk
- Record of leading and coaching engineers (including senior engineers), setting reusable technical standards across teams, and elevating delivery capability of a group
- Knowledge of the ServiceNow platform and CRM & Industry domains (sales automation, CPQ, customer service, field service) preferred but not mandatory
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. Advanced degrees or relevant certifications are a plus but do not substitute for demonstrated ability to deliver reliable AI solutions to customers
- Years of experience: 15 years with a bachelor's degree in computer science; or 12 years with a Master's degree; or a PhD with 8 years' experience; or equivalent experience
