Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer

Company Description

It all started when engineer Fred Luddy wrote code that automated a tedious task for his coworker, Phyllis. She cried tears of joy. That moment inspired Fred to build a company that could do that for everyone—freeing people from busywork so they could focus on meaningful work. Today, ServiceNow is the AI control tower for business reinvention. Our ServiceNow AI platform brings together any AI, any data, and any workflow— helping 85% of the Fortune 500® work smarter, faster, and better. We're building an AI-native culture where technology and talent are unstoppable together. And we're just getting started.

Join us to put AI to work for people.

 

Job Description

As a Staff Engineer, you will independently lead the design, development, and delivery of complex, high-impact AI-native and cloud-native systems. You'll work at the intersection of UI, backend, and AI-driven engineering — architecting solutions that improve developer experience, expand platform capabilities, and drive engineering excellence across the team. This role requires the ability to balance technical depth with organizational impact, working across teams to solve ambiguous problems and drive platform improvements.

What you get to do in this role:

• Design and implement AI-Native product development, using cutting-edge technical approaches to deliver business value
• Build high-quality, clean, scalable, and reusable code by enforcing best practices around software engineering architecture and processes (Code Reviews, Unit Testing, etc.)
• Drive complex, multi team technical initiatives and resolve architectural conflicts without management escalation
• Own your code from design through implementation, test automation, and delivery
• Collaborate with product managers to define feature sets that solve real customer problems
• Lead architecture and code reviews, mentor senior engineers, and raise the front end bar across the organization
• Build the evaluation infrastructure: golden datasets, multi-turn suites, judge calibration, CI gates, and drift detection.
• Bring judgment on where AI belongs in the engineering workflow, and set the guardrails for AI assisted development
• Make informed architectural and technical trade-off decisions between latency, cost, scalability, reliability, and model quality
• Stay current with emerging AI/ML frameworks, services, and techniques; evaluate and recommend adoption where applicable
• Contribute to code and architecture standards; ensure adherence to established best practices

Qualifications

• Experience in leveraging critical thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving. This may include using AI-powered tools, automating workflows, analyzing AI-driven insights, or exploring AI’s potential impact on the function or industry.
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with a track record of delivering high-quality products.
• 3+ years of hands-on work with LLM prompting, agent design, and retrieval systems (RAG, semantic search,
• Experience integrating LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Bedrock, Vertex, or similar), including tool/function calling, structured-output enforcement, and guardrails.
• Experience building and debugging evaluation harnesses and metrics for AI features, such as accuracy, reg detection.
• Working knowledge of embeddings, vector stores, and the failure modes of probabilistic systems, enough to debug and verify behavior in production.
• Strong JavaScript/Node.js and Python, Java, with solid data modeling and query optimization
• Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, design patterns, and performance optimization 
• Front-end experience with modern frameworks (React, Lit, Angular, or Vue) for conversation-first experiences.
• Automated testing (unit and integration), CI/CD, containers, and observability, plus on-call or incident experience with customer-facing systems.
• Current, effective use of AI coding agents, with evidence of accountable delivery: precise specs, critica harnesses.
• Demonstrated mentorship and a record of raising quality through code review.
• Clear communication with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience with LLM orchestration frameworks and vector databases (LangChain, LlamaIndex, pgvector, or similar).
• Familiarity with automated testing frameworks (e.g., JUnit, Playwright, TestNG) and integrating tests into CI/CD pipelines 
• Understanding software quality principles including reliability, observability, and production readiness. 
• Ability to troubleshoot complex systems and optimize performance across the stack. 
• Experience with AI-powered tools or workflows, including validation of datasets, model predictions, and inference consistency. 
• Comfort with development tools such as IDEs, debuggers, profilers, source control, and Unix-based systems 

Additional Information

Work Personas

We approach our distributed world of work with flexibility and trust. Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are categories that are assigned to ServiceNow employees depending on the nature of their work and their assigned work location. Learn more here. To determine eligibility for a work persona, ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow office using a third-party service.

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. In addition, all qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with legal requirements.  

Accommodations

We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. 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, please contact globaltalentss@servicenow.com for assistance. 

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 from government authorities for certain individuals. All employment is contingent upon ServiceNow obtaining any export license or other approval that may be required by relevant export control authorities. 

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Experience Level

Senior Level