Director of Engineering, AI Security Incubation & Innovation

ServiceNow•Santa Clara, CA

2d•$221,200 - $387,100•Hybrid

About The Position

The Security and Risk Engineering organization is a dynamic group of builders, thinkers, and problem-solvers dedicated to delivering scalable, world-class AI-powered security solutions to reduce risk and protect the company and our customers. We value AI first solutions, clean architecture, intuitive user experiences, and a culture of continuous improvement. Security is a key strategic growth area for ServiceNow, and every engineer here plays a key role in driving innovation and shaping the quality and reliability of our security and risk products. In this role, you will lead a high-impact engineering team chartered to reimagine cybersecurity through AI, creating AI-native products and capabilities that fundamentally change how security teams detect, investigate, prioritize, and respond to threats. You will drive zero-to-one innovation, rapidly translating emerging AI technologies and new ideas into prototypes, validated concepts, and production-grade enterprise solutions. You will define the technical vision and architecture for AI-native security solutions, leveraging frontier models, agentic AI, reasoning, retrieval, knowledge systems, and advanced ML techniques. You will explore and apply emerging AI capabilities to solve complex cybersecurity problems in fundamentally new ways—not simply augment existing products with AI. You will build autonomous and agentic security experiences that can reason over security context, orchestrate tools and workflows, and take appropriate actions with minimal human intervention. You will remain deeply engaged technically, providing architectural leadership and hands-on guidance on critical technology decisions, prototypes, and implementations. You will establish rapid experimentation and development practices that enable the team to learn, iterate, and deliver at startup speed while meeting enterprise requirements for security, reliability, scalability, and governance. You will partner closely with Product, UX, security researchers, customers, and engineering leaders to identify high-value problems and translate them into differentiated product experiences. You will build and develop a team of exceptional engineers with strong backgrounds in AI/ML, distributed systems, and cybersecurity, creating a culture of technical excellence, experimentation, and bold innovation. You will champion AI-native engineering practices, including extensive use of AI coding agents and autonomous development, testing, evaluation, and operational workflows. You will represent the team's technology and innovation with executives, customers, partners, and the broader engineering organization.

Requirements

Deep technical expertise in modern AI/ML, with demonstrated experience building production AI systems using LLMs, foundation models, agentic architectures, RAG, embeddings, knowledge retrieval, model evaluation, and related technologies.
A proven track record of building innovative AI-native products from the ground up, ideally taking new concepts from experimentation through enterprise-scale production.
Strong understanding of agentic architectures, including planning and reasoning, tool use, context and memory, multi-agent systems, evaluation, observability, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop patterns.
Strong technical foundation in software architecture, distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, data systems, and APIs, with the ability to go deep into architecture and code.
Strong proficiency in Python and experience with modern AI frameworks and infrastructure; experience with Java, Go, or similar languages is valuable.
An innovator's mindset with the ability to challenge conventional approaches, identify opportunities created by rapidly evolving AI technology, and turn ambitious ideas into working products.
Ability to operate effectively in ambiguity and balance rapid experimentation with the rigor required for enterprise-grade security products.
Experience building and leading highly technical engineering teams while remaining sufficiently hands-on to guide architecture and technical direction.
Strong product instincts and the ability to connect technology innovation to customer problems, differentiated experiences, and business outcomes.
Executive-level communication skills and the ability to articulate a compelling technical vision to engineers, customers, and senior leadership.
10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant technical and engineering leadership responsibility.
Demonstrated experience designing and delivering AI/ML-powered products and platforms in production.
Experience building AI-native products on modern cloud-native architectures from inception through production.
Hands-on experience with modern AI development technologies, including frontier LLMs, agent frameworks, retrieval/vector technologies, model evaluation and observability.
Extensive experience using AI-native development tools and coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, or equivalent as part of the software development lifecycle.
Experience designing AI evaluation, safety, security, governance, and policy guardrails for production AI systems.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience applying AI to cybersecurity problems such as threat detection, vulnerability and exposure management, security operations, identity security, investigation, risk prioritization, or autonomous remediation strongly preferred.
Experience in cybersecurity products or deep familiarity with modern security architectures and security operations is strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

Lead a high-impact engineering team chartered to reimagine cybersecurity through AI, creating AI-native products and capabilities that fundamentally change how security teams detect, investigate, prioritize, and respond to threats.
Drive zero-to-one innovation, rapidly translating emerging AI technologies and new ideas into prototypes, validated concepts, and production-grade enterprise solutions.
Define the technical vision and architecture for AI-native security solutions, leveraging frontier models, agentic AI, reasoning, retrieval, knowledge systems, and advanced ML techniques.
Explore and apply emerging AI capabilities to solve complex cybersecurity problems in fundamentally new ways—not simply augment existing products with AI.
Build autonomous and agentic security experiences that can reason over security context, orchestrate tools and workflows, and take appropriate actions with minimal human intervention.
Remain deeply engaged technically, providing architectural leadership and hands-on guidance on critical technology decisions, prototypes, and implementations.
Establish rapid experimentation and development practices that enable the team to learn, iterate, and deliver at startup speed while meeting enterprise requirements for security, reliability, scalability, and governance.
Partner closely with Product, UX, security researchers, customers, and engineering leaders to identify high-value problems and translate them into differentiated product experiences.
Build and develop a team of exceptional engineers with strong backgrounds in AI/ML, distributed systems, and cybersecurity, creating a culture of technical excellence, experimentation, and bold innovation.
Champion AI-native engineering practices, including extensive use of AI coding agents and autonomous development, testing, evaluation, and operational workflows.
Represent the team's technology and innovation with executives, customers, partners, and the broader engineering organization.