Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Agentic AI

About the Team

AI Engineering and Delivery is the customer-obsessed engineering group building the agentic AI and enterprise-scale search systems that power Now Assist, AI Agents, and the AI-driven experiences our customers rely on every day. We build AI as foundational platform infrastructure — prioritizing robustness, performance, safety, and real-world customer impact at scale.

Responsibilities

Types of problems you’ll get to work on:

• Design, build, and operate production-grade agentic AI systems embedded across ServiceNow's platform — autonomous agents that reason over real enterprise data, take action across workflows, and run safely at Fortune 500 scale.

Your Core Focus Areas:

• Agentic architecture: Design and ship multi-agent systems — orchestration, tool use, planning loops, memory, and failure recovery — that operate reliably in production, not in notebooks.
• Enterprise-grounded reasoning: Build agents that leverage ServiceNow's data layer — CMDB, Workflow Data Fabric, and Knowledge Graph — to make decisions with context no frontier model has on its own.
• Trust, safety, and governance: Own the guardrails: observability, human-in-the-loop controls, and compliance infrastructure that make autonomous systems safe to deploy at scale.
• Retrieval and grounding: Work closely with our search team to ensure agents are grounded in accurate, low-latency retrieval — RAG pipelines, hybrid search, re-ranking, and evaluation — as a critical dependency of agentic quality.
• Model integration and evaluation: Integrate frontier models (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI) into the Sense → Decide → Act → Govern architecture; evaluate trade-offs across cost, latency, and capability for production use cases.
• Engineering leadership: Raise the technical bar through architecture decisions, code reviews, and coaching — particularly on agentic design patterns and production AI discipline.

Requirements

To be successful in this role you have:

• 8+ years of software engineering with strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
• Formal grounding in machine learning fundamentals — modeling, training, evaluation, and the principles behind modern deep learning, LLMs, and agent architectures.
• Hands-on depth designing, shipping, and operating agentic systems in production — multi-agent orchestration, tool calling, planning loops, memory, and failure recovery. Not prototypes.
• Proven experience building and operating production-grade, full-stack AI systems and services end to end — model integration, APIs, serving infrastructure, and the application layer.
• Production-grade Python. Systems language (Go, Java, or C++) is a plus.
• Working experience with frontier AI SDKs (Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI) — prompt engineering, structured outputs, and model evaluation in production settings.
• Track record of technical leadership: architecture ownership, code quality bar-raising, and mentoring engineers on production AI practices.

Nice to Have

• Specialization in search and retrieval at scale — RAG pipelines, hybrid search, vector stores, re-ranking, and retrieval evaluation — or MLOps/model observability.
• Published work or open-source contributions in agentic systems or retrieval.
• Exposure to LLM fine-tuning or inference optimization in production.

Why Join Us

Intelligence is commoditizing. Context and execution are not. With 100B+ workflows, 6.5T transactions a year, and 85% of the Fortune 500 on our platform, we are building the system that makes AI actually work inside the enterprise — Sense, Decide, Act, Govern.

What's shipping as we speak:

• AI Specialists autonomously resolving cases across IT, CRM, HR, and Security.
• Action Fabric opening our full system of action to any external agent via MCP — Anthropic's Claude Cowork is the first design partner.
• Project Arc with NVIDIA bringing governed autonomous desktop agents into production.
• Build Agent live inside Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot.
• AI Control Tower with kill-switch capabilities and cross-vendor agent governance.

These are production systems at Fortune 500 scale, not roadmap slides. You'd work across three problem spaces at the frontier of what we do:

• Autonomous Enterprise: Self-driving business processes grounded in CMDB, Workflow Data Fabric, and Knowledge Graph — context no frontier lab can replicate.
• Omni-channel AI Resolution: Production voice, chat, and computer-use agents with generative UI, live with customers today.
• AI Control Tower: Identity, entitlements, and audit-grade compliance for every agentic system in the enterprise — nobody else has this layer.

You will build the substrate that connects all four: SENSE (any data) → DECIDE (any AI model) → ACT (any workflow) → GOVERN (identity + governance). The architectural inflection point is now.

Pay

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $201,300 - $352,300, 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.
• ESPP (Employee Stock Purchase Plan).
• Matching donations.
• Flexible time away plan and family leave programs.