Staff AI Engineer - Conversational & Agentic AI

About the role

The Agentic Engineering organization at ServiceNow is the customer-obsessed engineering group that builds a conversational AI experience that turns enterprise intent into completed work. The Agent Orchestration team — the team you'll join — owns the execution core: the agent harness, orchestration runtime, multi-agent coordination, memory management, and the evaluation frameworks that ensure agents behave correctly in production.

Responsibilities

• Own significant parts of the agent harness — the infrastructure layer that enables AI agents to reason over real enterprise data, take action across workflows, and run safely at Fortune 500 scale.
  • Harness engineering: Design and build the agent execution harness — the orchestration layer that routes inputs, manages context, invokes tools, handles retries, and surfaces execution state across multi-step agentic workflows
  • Reliability at scale: Own the runtime's fault tolerance, latency, and throughput; design for enterprise workflows that cannot fail silently or unpredictably
  • Observability: Instrument the harness with tracing, cost attribution, and latency visibility so the team can reason about agent behavior in production and catch failures before customers do
  • Prompt infrastructure: Build prompt management systems — versioning, templating, and systematic evaluation — that keep agent behavior stable across model updates and configuration changes
  • Eval engineering: Design and own evaluation frameworks (unit evals, integration evals, production monitors) that measure agent quality, catch regressions, and drive data-informed decisions
  • LLM integration: Integrate with and abstract over frontier LLMs, managing model routing, fallback strategies, cost, and latency trade-offs in production
  • Technical leadership: Set technical standards through architecture decisions, code reviews, and coaching — particularly on agentic design patterns and production AI discipline
  • System boundary design: Define where agent logic lives — what's a tool call, a sub-agent, a hardcoded path, or a human escalation — and establish those design standards across the team

Qualifications

• 7+ years building production software systems with a strong track record on reliability, performance, and scalability
• Solid depth in how large language models work: failure modes, context constraints, and how prompt design shapes model behavior at scale
• Practical prompt engineering experience: systematically designing, versioning, and evaluating prompts across model updates or A/B evaluation cycles
• A real track record in eval engineering — not just familiarity, but a portfolio of evaluation suites designed, shipped, and used to drive quality decisions in production AI systems
• Cost and efficiency awareness at the system level: experience reasoning about model routing, inference cost, and latency tradeoffs in production
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: distributed systems, API design, and testing discipline
• Comfort operating in fast-moving, ambiguous, startup-like AI product environments

Benefits

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $176,100 - $308,200, plus equity (when applicable), variable/incentive compensation and benefits. Sales positions generally offer a competitive On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive compensation structure.

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.
• 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.
• 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 license or other approval that may be required by relevant export control authorities.