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ServiceNow is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to own the long-term architecture and execution of AI-native user experiences across its platform. This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on designing and building user-facing surfaces where agentic backends—recommendations, autonomous triage, generated fixes, multi-step reasoning—are exposed to end users through fast, trustworthy, low-friction interaction patterns.
Key responsibilities include:
**UX Architecture & Strategy** — Define the long-term architecture for AI-native experiences, making critical build-vs-buy decisions around design systems, agent-to-UI interaction patterns, and real-time/streaming UX for AI-generated content to ensure resilience and coherence at scale.
**AI-Native Intelligent Experiences** — Own the hard UX problems unique to AI-native products: progressive disclosure of agent reasoning, graceful handling of uncertainty and latency, human-in-the-loop review flows, and making autonomous system behavior legible and controllable rather than a black box.
**UXC & Workspace Platform** — Deep ownership of the UXC (UI16) surface—component architecture, design system consistency, and performance—as the primary canvas for AI-native features.
**Agentic Pipeline Awareness** — Partner closely with platform and ML teams building agent orchestration and tool-calling infrastructure, translating backend capabilities into UX patterns that are usable, safe, and trustworthy.
**Business Alignment** — Connect UX and technical architecture decisions to business outcomes: customer acquisition, retention, and time-to-market.
**Hands-on Engineering** — Write high-performance, production-grade code primarily in the frontend/experience stack (Lit.js, React/TypeScript, design systems, component architecture), with working fluency in backend/platform code (Java, Python, Postgres, Kubernetes) to collaborate effectively with platform teams.
**Cross-functional Execution** — Drive business-critical outcomes in close collaboration with ML, backend platform, and product teams.
**Engineering Culture & Mentorship** — Mentor senior engineers, champion UX and engineering excellence, and foster a culture of rapid, impact-driven innovation.
**Ownership & Initiative** — Proactively identify UX and platform gaps, propose solutions, align stakeholders, and drive execution with high ownership.
**Requirements:**
- 15+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated progression to Principal or Sr. Staff Engineer level, concentrated in user experience/frontend platform engineering at a high-growth tech company or top-tier AI lab.
- Deep UXC/AI-native UX expertise: shipped intelligent, AI-driven user experiences (not just consumed LLM APIs), with strong intuition for how agent/model output should surface to real users.
- Hands-on experience with agentic/multi-agent systems from the consumer side: understands agent orchestration, tool-calling protocols (MCP or equivalent), and reasoning traceability well enough to design UX around them.
- Strong hands-on coding ability with deep design thinking in the frontend/experience stack (React/TypeScript, component/design systems) and working proficiency in backend fundamentals (Kubernetes, Java, Python, Postgres).
- Demonstrated ability to connect UX and engineering decisions to business outcomes (adoption, retention, time-to-market).
- Self-driven with strong ownership; able to identify gaps, propose solutions, align stakeholders, and execute at startup pace.
- Experience integrating or critically evaluating AI tools/agentic workflows in product and engineering decision-making, particularly from a user-experience and trust/legibility angle.
- Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering and platform work—AI-powered tooling, automated operational workflows, agentic systems, or reasoning about AI's impact on infrastructure.
**Good to Have:**
- Prior experience in distributed systems performance/scalability.
- Open-source contributions to major AI-native UX, design-system, or agent-framework projects.
- Prior startup experience working closely with Product and Growth teams in an early-stage environment.
