SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 190,900 - 334,100 / annual
ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer (IC5) to set technical vision and architecture across AI-native and cloud-native systems. This is a strategic technical leadership role combining deep expertise with organizational influence and mentorship of senior engineers.
Key Responsibilities:
Technical Vision & Strategy: Define technical vision and multi-year roadmaps for AI-native and cloud-native systems. Lead development of core platforms and infrastructure enabling AI-native development at scale (evaluation frameworks, monitoring, security, deployment). Drive adoption of emerging AI/ML technologies and establish technical standards and architectural principles across the organization. Own technical roadmaps for critical business initiatives involving AI, champion foundational improvements with organization-wide impact, and influence platform-level decisions balancing cost, latency, reliability, and model quality.
Organizational Leadership & Mentorship: Mentor and develop senior engineers (IC3/IC4) and engineering leaders. Lead technical hiring at senior levels and contribute to building world-class engineering teams. Establish engineering culture focused on technical excellence, learning, ownership, and collaboration. Conduct architectural and design reviews providing critical feedback. Foster knowledge sharing through documentation, technical talks, and community engagement.
Architecture & Systems Design: Design and architect large, complex systems involving multiple teams, cloud infrastructure, and sophisticated AI/ML components. Lead design of evaluation frameworks, observability systems, and production monitoring for AI-driven features at scale. Establish security architecture and responsible AI guardrails. Design high-performance data platforms, embedding systems, and retrieval pipelines. Drive architectural decisions balancing performance, cost, scalability, reliability, developer experience, and business value.
Cross-Organizational Influence: Communicate technical vision to executives, product leadership, and engineering teams. Partner with product, design, and domain specialists on ambitious technical roadmaps. Represent engineering in high-stakes customer and partnership discussions. Translate complex AI/ML concepts for diverse audiences. Advocate for technical health and long-term sustainability.
Software Development Excellence: Develop innovative solutions to complex technical challenges, particularly around AI/ML integration and distributed systems. Prototype and validate new approaches. Contribute to critical code paths modeling best practices in code quality, testing, and maintainability. Build evaluation frameworks, monitoring systems, and testing infrastructure at scale. Implement security best practices and responsible AI guardrails.
ServiceNow Platform Strategy: Define platform architecture and integration patterns for AI-native ServiceNow applications. Establish best practices and architectural standards for ServiceNow development. Lead technical decisions on platform capabilities vs. custom development trade-offs. Drive adoption of ServiceNow platform features and managed services.
Customer Strategy & Support Leadership: Shape organizational approach to customer support and issue resolution. Lead customer-critical incident response and complex troubleshooting. Engage with strategic customers on technical topics and roadmap alignment. Gather and synthesize customer feedback to inform product and platform strategy.
Requirements:
- 14+ years of software development experience with a Bachelor's degree; OR 8+ years with a Master's degree; OR 5+ years with a PhD; OR equivalent work experience
- Hands-on experience with cloud-native and AI-native systems or equivalent senior-level roles
- Hands-on experience with LLM/AI systems at scale, including prompt engineering, agent design, retrieval systems, and production AI/ML services
- 5+ years of hands-on experience building and scaling systems with third-party AI/ML services and platform APIs across multiple cloud providers
- 3+ years of experience designing and building applications on platform-as-a-service or SaaS platforms; deep expertise with ServiceNow platform at scale (preferred)
- Expert-level proficiency in Python, Java, and JavaScript/GlideScript; deep expertise in ServiceNow scripting, APIs, and platform architecture
- Demonstrated expertise in distributed systems design, microservices architecture, and large-scale systems
- Proven track record designing high-performance, mission-critical data pipelines, embedding systems, and vector databases
- Expert knowledge of LLM orchestration frameworks, RAG architectures, retrieval optimization, and vector database technologies
- Deep expertise with cloud computing (AWS/GCP/Azure), managed AI services, and infrastructure-as-code
- Strong background in Kubernetes, containerization, and cloud-native deployment patterns
- Expertise in building evaluation frameworks, metrics systems, and production monitoring for AI/ML systems
- Experience with and strong opinions about secure coding practices, responsible AI, and compliance requirements
- Experience leading customer-critical initiatives or providing technical leadership on strategic accounts
