Principal AI Native Software Engineer

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.

The Analytics Intelligence Team is responsible for ServiceNow's Conversational Analytics experience, allowing customers to ask questions about their data in plain language and receive high-accuracy results. Initial products include AI Data Explorer and Query Generation. The immediate future involves making these products fully agentic, considering semantic layers, knowledge graphs, data catalogs, and universal context engines.

About the role

We're looking for a Principal Engineer to work collaboratively with other architects and help drive the technical direction for conversational analytics. They’ll need to go deep on architecture whilst also being an outstanding verbal and written communicator across engineering, product, and leadership. The ability to align competing opinions is a necessary skill. The right candidate will be hands-on and have a customer mindset, with the ability to rapidly create technical prototypes to demonstrate value. The role will involve coaching other software engineers of all levels, so it’s important they are not only humble but have significant hands-on technical depth.

Responsibilities

• Build the best cloud-based AI/ML solutions to power intelligent enterprise services
• Collaborate daily with a team of like-minded developers, product managers, and quality engineers to produce quality software
• Work with product owners to understand detailed requirements and own your code from design, implementation, testing, and delivery of high-quality solutions to our users

Requirements

• Experience in leveraging or critically 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.
• 12+ years building and shipping large-scale, production software systems
• Proficiency in Java, Python, JavaScript, SQL
• AI Native development experience, utilizing coding tools such as Claude Code
• Experience with vector-based retrieval, agentic/tool architectures, universal context engines, data catalogs, knowledge graphs, semantic layers
• Strong focus on customer success metrics, specifically accuracy and associated evaluation frameworks and datasets
• Proven ability to coach other engineers, with the viewpoint of winning and growing as a team
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; able to flex between deep technical detail and executive-level framing
• Experience with BI/Analytics Platforms and NLQ
• An understanding of the ServiceNow ecosystem, and how it is intentionally different from other tech stacks

Pay

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $216,100 - $378,200, plus equity (when applicable), variable/incentive compensation, and benefits. Sales positions generally offer a competitive On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive compensation structure. Please note that the base pay shown is a guideline, and individual total compensation will vary based on factors such as qualifications, skill level, competencies, and work location.

Benefits

• Health plans, including flexible spending accounts
• 401(k) Plan with company match
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Matching donations
• Flexible time away plan and family leave programs

Schedule

Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are categories assigned to ServiceNow employees depending on the nature of their work and their assigned work location. 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.