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Salary: USD 190,900 - 334,100 / annual
ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead the Platform Access Controls team within Platform Security Core. This is a key technical leadership role responsible for setting architectural direction for the authorization platform as it expands to secure AI Agent access across the product stack.
The Platform Access Controls team owns ServiceNow's core authorization frameworks, including ACLs, Security Policies, Security Attributes, and Security Filters. The team validates identity and access for every transaction across the platform, ensuring a secure-by-default experience.
In this role, you will:
- Set the technical vision and architecture strategy for the authorization platform, balancing long-term scalability with delivery objectives while maintaining security-by-default posture
- Work on core authorization frameworks that touch every part of the product, ensuring high quality, reliability, security, and performance
- Own features from design through delivery, turning business requirements into well-architected, cross-team solutions
- Lead design and code reviews, championing access control best practices, performance, maintainability, and testability across multiple teams
- Implement software that is simple for customers and applications to extend and customize
- Define comprehensive test strategies covering functional, regression, integration, and performance testing
- Diagnose, resolve, and develop root cause mitigation plans for the hardest production issues across the security stack
- Mentor engineers at every level and raise the technical bar across the organization
ServiceNow is the AI control tower for business reinvention, bringing together any AI, any data, and any workflow. The company serves 85% of the Fortune 500 and is building an AI-native culture where technology and talent work together.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 12+ 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
- Domain experience in authorization technologies such as RBAC, ABAC, policy engines or related areas
- Demonstrated success completing complex, cross-team projects on time and with quality
- Experience troubleshooting difficult production issues (memory leaks, concurrency issues, caching issues, network problems, intermittent failures) across the stack
- Track record of technical leadership—influencing architecture and engineering decisions across multiple teams without direct authority
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including experience authoring design docs/RFCs and presenting technical strategy to senior leadership
- Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, design patterns, and performance optimization at scale
- Expert-level understanding of best practices for object-oriented and modularized software, with emphasis on Java and Golang
- Experience with automated testing frameworks (JUnit, Selenium, TestNG) and integrating tests into CI/CD pipelines
- Deep understanding of software quality principles including reliability, observability, and production readiness
- Experience leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into engineering work—whether using AI-powered coding and operational tooling, automating workflows, or reasoning about how AI changes software and infrastructure development
- Aptitude for learning new technologies quickly
NICE TO HAVE:
- Prior experience with ServiceNow Platform
- Prior experience building authorization frameworks
- Experience with Kubernetes-based services and deploying them in regulated environments with compliance and governance requirements
