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ServiceNow is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to own the architecture and execution of a server-rendered web component platform powering AI-native user experiences across their product suite.
In this role, you will define long-term platform architecture for rendering, component runtime, design systems, and streaming UX for AI-generated content. You'll own end-to-end experience performance including server-side rendering, streaming HTML, hydration correctness, and time-to-interactive metrics. A core focus is building platform primitives that expose agentic backends to end users—recommendations, autonomous triage, generated insights, and multi-step agent reasoning—while solving hard UX problems unique to AI-native products: streaming model output, progressive disclosure of agent reasoning, graceful latency handling, and human-in-the-loop review flows.
You will design how the platform runs in production on Kubernetes, including sandboxed execution, multi-tenant isolation, secure credential propagation, resource budgeting, version-tiered rollouts, and observability for large Node.js fleets. You'll shape the component model, data-loading APIs, design system, tooling, and guardrails enabling many teams to build on the platform. Close collaboration with ML and platform teams building agent orchestration and tool-calling infrastructure (MCP-style integration, reasoning traceability) is essential—translating backend capabilities into usable, safe, trustworthy UX patterns.
You'll write high-performance, production-grade code across the experience stack (TypeScript, Lit.js, Web Components, Node.js, modern build tooling) and runtime stack (Kubernetes, containerized services). You'll debug the hardest problems yourself and mentor senior and staff engineers, leading architecture reviews and raising the bar on testing and reliability. Success requires connecting platform and UX decisions to business outcomes—adoption, retention, time-to-market—and spotting gaps before they become problems.
**Requirements:**
- 15+ years of software engineering experience, focused in frontend or web platform engineering at high-growth tech companies or top-tier AI labs
- Deep expertise in web platform internals: Web Components and Shadow DOM, server-side rendering and hydration, streaming, module loading, and browser performance
- Production experience with Lit.js, React, or comparable frameworks, with clear understanding of tradeoffs
- Strong server-side JavaScript/TypeScript skills: Node.js, HTTP/2, proxies, streaming, V8 memory behavior, isolate or worker-based execution models
- Hands-on experience running latency-sensitive services on Kubernetes: resource management, rollout strategies, Helm, production observability
- Strong web security fundamentals: session and token handling, egress control, sandboxing of untrusted code, multi-tenant trust boundaries
- Shipped intelligent, AI-driven user experiences (not just consumed LLM APIs); strong intuition for surfacing agent and model output to real users
- Hands-on experience with agentic or multi-agent systems from the consumer side
- Understanding of agent orchestration, tool-calling protocols (MCP or equivalent), and reasoning traceability to design UX and platform primitives
- Experience designing frameworks, SDKs, or design systems adopted by many teams, including versioning, backward compatibility, and migration strategy
- Track record connecting platform and UX decisions to business outcomes (adoption, retention, time-to-market), not just technical metrics
- Self-driven with strong ownership; able to identify gaps, propose solutions, align stakeholders, and execute at startup pace
**Good to Have:**
- Experience in distributed systems performance, scalability, or large-scale Node.js fleet operations
- Open-source contributions to major web frameworks, SSR tooling, build systems, design systems, or agent-framework projects
- Experience with enterprise SaaS platforms and extensibility/customization models
- Prior startup experience working closely with Product and Growth teams in early-stage environments
