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ServiceNow is seeking a Staff Software Engineer (IC4) to design, build, and operate AI-native capabilities for IT Service Management. This role focuses on building agentic and conversational experiences that interpret user intent, reason over incident and request contexts, invoke tools and workflows, and act on behalf of users across incident-to-resolution and request-to-fulfillment lifecycles.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and ship AI-native features across IT service management, including guided request categorization, natural-language incident classification, conversational status updates, intelligent assignment and routing, knowledge article recommendation, and auto-remediation orchestration.
- Design AI-driven autonomous workflows by decomposing ITSM processes into executable steps, determining where autonomy is appropriate versus human checkpoints, and handling exceptions and hand-offs.
- Author and maintain agentic instructions as engineering artifacts—system instructions, role definitions, tool descriptions, guardrails, and escalation paths—under code review and source control.
- Build automated evaluation and testing frameworks for non-deterministic behavior, including golden datasets, multi-turn conversation suites, model-as-judge scoring, CI gates, drift detection, and adversarial testing.
- Design conversational experiences across channels (chat and voice) that hold context, hand off between automated and live agents, and account for voice-specific constraints like latency, barge-in, and speech recognition error.
- Specify requirements precisely and direct AI coding agents, converting requirements into testable specifications with explicit scope, constraints, and acceptance criteria; supervise multiple workstreams and review output for correctness, security, and maintainability.
- Own quality, safety, and reliability in production by monitoring conversation quality, hallucination rates, tool-selection errors, and unsafe actions; defend against prompt injection and data leakage; maintain observability and rollback mechanisms.
- Build full-stack delivery including applications, APIs, data models, and integrations with CI/CD, observability, and upgrade-safe extensibility.
- Collaborate across product, design, and engineering teams; mentor IC1–IC3 engineers and raise team practices around instruction authoring and accountable agent use.
Requirements:
- Production track record: Demonstrated record of building, shipping, and operating production software with hands-on delivery of AI-native application features; typically 9+ years of relevant software engineering experience.
- Agentic delivery experience: Direct experience authoring agentic instructions and prompts, designing AI-driven autonomous workflows, and building evaluation and testing frameworks (required, not preferred).
- Production AI integration: Experience integrating large language model APIs, retrieval-grounded features, agent orchestration, tool and function calling, and structured output enforcement.
- Domain ownership: Demonstrated ownership of a complex domain or subsystem end-to-end, including architectural decisions, migrations, and operational consequences.
- Engineering fundamentals: Strong command of data structures, algorithms, system design, APIs, data modeling, and testing; proficiency in modern front-end frameworks, server-side development, relational data modeling, and REST/GraphQL API design.
- Applied machine learning literacy: Working command of evaluation, embeddings, probabilistic output, and failure modes of modern models; ability to reason about, debug, and verify model-driven behavior in production.
- Accountable use of AI coding agents: Current, effective use of AI coding assistants with evidence of precise specification, critical review, and verification harnesses.
- Operational experience: Hands-on CI/CD, containerized workloads, observability, on-call and incident-command experience with customer-facing systems.
- Mentorship: Demonstrated mentorship of less-experienced engineers and raising quality through code review.
- Education: Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred experience includes ITSM domain depth, evaluation and observability tooling, conversation design partnership, forward-deployed delivery, and ServiceNow ITSM platform experience.
