Principal Software Engineer at ServiceNow (Santa Clara, CA onsite) is a senior, principal IC role focused on building assistive and autonomous AI-native capabilities for IT service and operations management customers. This team works on evidence-based experimentation, large-scale distributed systems, data ingestion and context creation, agentic harnesses, cost optimization, and feedback loops that help drive measurable value.
What you get
- Base pay: USD 221,200 - 387,100 per year (guideline), plus equity (when applicable), variable/incentive compensation, and benefits.
- Health plans including flexible spending accounts.
- 401(k) Plan with company match.
- ESPP.
- Matching donations.
- Flexible time away plan.
- Family leave programs.
What you get to do in this role
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will architect and build AI-native product capabilities that move Service Operations into an agentic-first era. Your work spans large-scale distributed systems, data ingestion, and context creation and utilization, along with agentic harnesses, cost optimization, and agentic feedback loops designed to ensure value realization for IT departments using ServiceNow’s IT service and operations management applications.
You will apply scientific-method thinking to ship and refine real product through iterative experimentation, pairing architectural judgment with deep technical expertise to validate what works with measurable outcomes.
Responsibilities
- Lead architecture and technical strategy for assigned problem areas within ITSM/ITOM products, collaborating with product and engineering leaders to assess blockers and opportunities for AI-native evolution and value realization.
- Contribute hands-on by spiking and shipping solutions, validating architectural hypotheses through code via prototypes, reference implementations, and critical path components.
- Design and validate solutions using evidence-based spiking: define hypotheses, run experiments, measure outcomes, and use data to guide architectural decisions and product direction.
- Architect the evolution of existing solutions toward AI-native capabilities, identifying where agentic patterns, data utilization, or autonomous workflows can unlock customer value and translating recommendations into executable work.
- Identify and close value realization gaps in agentic products that exist but are not delivering expected outcomes, diagnosing root causes across architecture, UX, data quality, feedback loops, and cost.
- Establish architecture patterns and best practices for your domain, documenting tradeoffs, rationale, and implementation guidance.
- Guide teams through complex technical decisions and design reviews, surfacing architectural risks early and helping navigate tradeoffs between shipping speed and long-term durability.
- Collaborate across ITSM/ITOM engineering teams to share learnings, validate approaches, and accelerate adoption of patterns that work.
Requirements
- 15+ years of related engineering experience, or equivalent practical experience.
- Strong experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, enterprise platforms, workflow systems, data-intensive products, integration frameworks, or cloud-scale infrastructure.
- Deep understanding of system design for scale, reliability, observability, fault tolerance, data quality, security, and production readiness.
- Strong technical depth in Java, Python, or similar programming languages.
- Proven ability to set technical direction, influence architecture across teams, and translate ambiguous product strategy into executable engineering plans.
- Ability to operate as a Principal IC through credibility, collaboration, and influence.
- Strong judgment balancing long-term architecture with pragmatic execution, customer impact, engineering velocity, and business priorities.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers, raising engineering standards, and building reusable patterns that create leverage across teams.
- AI experience strongly preferred: AI-powered products, automation platforms, AI-assisted workflows, or agentic systems.
- Experience reasoning about AI-assisted enterprise workflows, including data quality, workflow correctness, evaluation, observability, safety controls, and human-in-the-loop review.
- Strong plus: experience with enterprise service management and operational intelligence areas such as CMDB, discovery, service mapping, AIOps, observability, workflow automation, endpoint management, or operational intelligence.
- Plus: experience with large-scale enterprise customers, production systems, and complex migration or modernization efforts.
About the team
The Service Operations Business Unit brings together IT Service Management (ITSM), IT Operations Management (ITOM), and CMDB capabilities on the ServiceNow Platform. This product engineering organization builds software that helps customers deliver resilient, intelligent, and efficient enterprise services.
The Service Operations portfolio connects incident, request, fulfillment, infrastructure visibility, service mapping, trusted configuration data, automation, and AIOps into a unified operating model. By combining service delivery with operational intelligence and trusted operational context, these products support proactive, AI-assisted, and increasingly self-healing operations at enterprise scale.
Technologies
Work personas
Work personas are assigned based on the nature of the work and the assigned work location. ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow office using a third-party service to determine eligibility for a work persona.
Equal opportunity employer
ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or any other category protected by law. Applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered in accordance with legal requirements.
Accommodations
If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are unable to use this online application and need an alternative method to apply, contact globaltalentss@servicenow.com.
Export control regulations
For positions requiring access to controlled technology subject to export control regulations (including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations), ServiceNow may need to obtain export control approval from government authorities for certain individuals. Employment is contingent upon obtaining any required export license or other approval from relevant export control authorities.
