Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer

ServiceNow is hiring a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join AI Engineering and Delivery. In this onsite role in Santa Clara, CA, you will help design and build production-grade agentic AI systems and enterprise-scale search experiences that support Now Assist, AI Agents, and AI-driven workflows.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and contribute to production-grade agentic AI systems embedded across ServiceNow’s platform.
• Design and deliver multi-agent systems, including orchestration, tool use, planning loops, memory, and failure recovery, with reliable production behavior.
• Build agents that use ServiceNow data layer capabilities, including CMDB, Workflow Data Fabric, and the Knowledge Graph, to support context-aware decisions.
• Own guardrails for safe deployment at scale, including observability, human-in-the-loop controls, and compliance infrastructure.
• Partner with the search team to ensure agent grounding via accurate, low-latency retrieval, including RAG pipelines, hybrid search, re-ranking, and evaluation.
• Integrate frontier models (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI) into the Sense Decide Act Govern architecture and evaluate trade-offs across cost, latency, and capability for production use cases.
• Set architectural patterns for the group, make hard design decisions, conduct design reviews, and raise production AI standards across engineers and principals.
• Develop scalable and robust architectures to support deployment at scale across hyperscalers and ServiceNow infrastructure.
• Explore emerging model capabilities and apply them to real customer problems with a short delivery timeline.

Required Qualifications

• 6+ years of software engineering with strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
• Hands-on production experience designing, shipping, and operating agentic systems, including multi-agent orchestration, tool calling, planning loops, memory, and failure recovery.
• Production-grade Python.
• Working knowledge of frontier AI SDKs (Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI), including prompt engineering, structured outputs, and model evaluation in production.
• Familiarity with RAG and retrieval patterns in production, including vector stores, hybrid search, and retrieval evaluation metrics.
• Technical leadership experience, including architecture ownership, raising code quality standards, and mentoring engineers on production AI practices.
• Deeper specialization in search and retrieval at scale or MLOps/model observability.
• Published work or open-source contributions related to agentic systems or retrieval.
• Exposure to LLM fine-tuning or inference optimization in production.

Preferred and Additional Skills

• Systems language experience (Go, Java, or C++) is a plus.

Technologies

• Python, Go, Java, C++, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI
• CMDB, Workflow Data Fabric, Knowledge Graph
• RAG, hybrid search, vector stores, MCP
• Sense Decide Act Govern architecture

Compensation and Benefits

• Base pay: USD 201,300 - 352,300 per year (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

Work Persona Information

Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) depend on the nature of work and 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 the online application and need an alternative method to apply, contact [email protected].

Export Control Regulations

For positions requiring access to controlled technology subject to export control regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (EAR), ServiceNow may be required to obtain export control approval for certain individuals. Employment is contingent upon ServiceNow obtaining any export license or other approval required by relevant export control authorities.