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Salary: USD 221,200 - 387,100 / annual
ServiceNow's Application Lifecycle Engineering organization is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to help define technical strategy and architecture for the next generation of developer platforms and AI-powered engineering productivity solutions.
You will lead architecture and technical direction across developer tooling, automated testing, and application lifecycle management platforms. Your responsibilities include designing and building highly scalable platform services that improve developer productivity and software quality for enterprise customers, creating prototypes and proof-of-concepts to validate new technical approaches, and driving innovation around AI-enabled developer experiences and intelligent automation.
You'll partner closely with Product Management, Design, and Engineering leaders to translate strategic vision into technical execution. You will evaluate emerging technologies, influence architectural decisions across multiple engineering teams, establish engineering standards and best practices, and solve complex challenges related to scalability, reliability, observability, security, and performance across customer-facing platforms. Additionally, you'll mentor senior engineers and provide technical leadership through influence, collaboration, and technical excellence, while contributing to long-term platform evolution.
The team owns critical developer platform capabilities including automated testing, application lifecycle management, CI/CD integration, developer tooling, and emerging AI-powered capabilities. As ServiceNow continues investing in AI-native development experiences, the focus is on reimagining how developers build, test, validate, and operate applications through intelligent automation, agentic systems, and modern platform engineering practices.
REQUIREMENTS:
Required:
- 15+ years of software engineering experience or equivalent practical experience
- Deep expertise building large-scale distributed systems, developer platforms, cloud-native applications, or enterprise SaaS products
- Strong experience designing customer-facing platform capabilities, developer tools, or engineering productivity solutions
- Expert-level understanding of system architecture, scalability, reliability, observability, fault tolerance, and production operations
- Strong software development background with Java and modern distributed system design
- Proven ability to drive technical strategy and influence architecture across multiple teams and organizations
- Experience leading complex technical initiatives through collaboration rather than formal authority
- Strong communication skills and ability to work effectively across Engineering, Product Management, and Design organizations
- Track record of mentoring senior engineers and raising engineering standards across an organization
Preferred:
- Experience building developer tools, testing platforms, CI/CD systems, developer experience (DevEx) solutions, or application lifecycle management products
- Experience with automated testing frameworks, testability platforms, or software quality engineering at scale
- Experience developing AI-powered products, AI-assisted developer workflows, agentic systems, or intelligent automation capabilities
- Knowledge of software development lifecycle tooling, deployment automation, and platform engineering practices
- Experience building products used by software developers, administrators, or highly technical enterprise customers
- Familiarity with developer productivity metrics, platform adoption strategies, and customer-centric platform development
