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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 broad systems thinking, organizational influence, and mentorship of senior engineers.
You will define technical vision and strategy for AI-native and cloud-native systems, establishing multi-year technology roadmaps and architectural patterns. You'll lead development of core platforms and infrastructure enabling AI-native development at scale, including evaluation frameworks, monitoring, security, and deployment systems. You'll drive adoption of emerging AI/ML technologies and frameworks, establish technical standards and architectural principles organization-wide, and own technical roadmaps for critical business initiatives involving AI.
Organizational leadership is central to this role. You'll mentor and develop senior engineers (IC3/IC4) and engineering leaders, supporting their growth into leadership and architectural roles. You'll lead technical hiring at senior levels, establish engineering culture focused on technical excellence and learning, and support manager and team leadership development. You'll conduct architectural and design reviews, foster knowledge sharing through documentation and technical talks, and create career paths for engineering team members.
Architecturally, you'll design large, complex systems involving multiple teams, cloud infrastructure, and sophisticated AI/ML components. You'll lead design of evaluation frameworks, observability systems, and production monitoring for AI-driven features at scale. You'll establish security architecture and responsible AI guardrails, design high-performance data platforms and embedding systems, and drive architectural decisions balancing performance, cost, scalability, reliability, and business value.
You'll communicate technical vision to executives, product leadership, and engineering teams, influencing organizational priorities. You'll partner with product and design teams to define ambitious technical roadmaps aligned with business strategy, represent engineering in high-stakes customer discussions, and translate complex AI/ML concepts for diverse audiences.
You'll develop innovative solutions to the organization's most complex technical challenges, particularly around AI/ML integration and distributed systems. You'll prototype and validate new approaches, contribute to critical code paths, build evaluation frameworks and monitoring systems at scale, and implement security best practices and responsible AI guardrails.
You'll define platform architecture and integration patterns for AI-native ServiceNow applications, establish best practices for ServiceNow development, and lead technical decisions on platform capabilities versus custom development trade-offs. You'll shape organizational approach to customer support, lead customer-critical incident response, engage with strategic customers on technical topics, and establish programs improving customer experience.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 12+ years software development experience with Bachelor's degree; OR 8+ years with Master's degree; OR 5+ years with PhD; OR equivalent work experience
- 4+ years in cloud-native and AI-native systems or equivalent senior-level roles
- 5+ years experience with LLM/AI systems at scale, including prompt engineering, agent design, retrieval systems, and production AI/ML services
- 5+ years hands-on experience building and scaling systems with third-party AI/ML services and platform APIs across multiple cloud providers
- 3+ years designing and building applications on platform-as-a-service or SaaS platforms; deep expertise with ServiceNow platform at scale
- 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
- Exceptional communication skills; ability to influence across technical seniority levels and non-technical audiences; demonstrated customer engagement experience
- Proven ability to lead large, cross-functional technical initiatives; track record of significant technical accomplishments
- Strong background in software architecture, system design, and technical strategy; experience shaping platform strategy and roadmap
- Experience mentoring senior engineers, engineering managers, or technical leaders
- Experience leading customer-critical initiatives or providing technical leadership on strategic accounts
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related field; advanced degree or significant AI/ML research/publications is a plus
- Active engagement with broader engineering and AI/ML community (conferences, publications, open-source, etc.)
- Demonstrated thought leadership in AI-native development, cloud architecture, or software engineering
