Director, Software Engineering Management

ServiceNow•Santa Clara, CA

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

The engineering organization is a dynamic group of builders, thinkers, and problem-solvers focused on delivering scalable, AI-powered software products that improve how IT organizations function and deliver value. We value clean architecture, intuitive experiences, operational excellence, and a culture of continuous improvement. Every engineer plays an important role in shaping the quality, reliability, and long-term success of our products. You'll join a small, founding engineering team building a new product from the ground up with the mandate and latitude to make foundational decisions on architecture, stack, and engineering practices. This is a rare setup: startup-level speed, ownership, and blank-canvas building, backed by the distribution, resources, and scale of ServiceNow. The team is still small and early-stage today, which means the Director hired into this role will have outsized influence over how the engineering org is shaped from here — team structure, technical standards, and culture included.

Requirements

15+ years of related engineering experience, including 7+ years leading and managing engineering teams for a product at scale.
A significant portion of the experience should be in startups building 0-1 products, taking them to market, and rapidly scaling users using PLG motions and experiments.
Strong experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, enterprise platforms, workflow systems, data-intensive products, integration frameworks, or cloud-scale infrastructure.
Deep understanding of system design for scale, reliability, observability, fault tolerance, data quality, security, and production readiness.
Proven ability to define technical direction, influence architecture across teams, and translate ambiguous product strategy into executable engineering plans.
Demonstrated success in building a high performance culture within in a team of senior engineers without compromising wellbeing.
Ability to lead through formal authority and technical credibility alike, building alignment across peer engineering, Product, Design, Security, Operations, Sales, and Customer Success organizations.
Strong judgment in balancing long-term architecture with pragmatic execution, customer impact, engineering velocity, and business priorities.
Strong experience with AI-powered products, AI-assisted workflows, and the extensive use of AI in the SDLC.

Responsibilities

Collaborate with stakeholders across Product, Design, Security, Operations, Sales, and Customer Success — aligning on roadmap and release readiness, meeting security and compliance requirements, and feeding field and customer signal back into engineering priorities.
Own technical strategy and delivery for your teams.
Set architectural direction, hold the bar on quality and reliability, and stay close enough to the work to validate hypotheses through evidence, not theory.
Hire, coach, and develop engineers, tech leads, and managers. Build inclusive, high-performing teams with clear career paths and durable ownership.
Lead the evolution of current solutions toward AI-native capabilities, identifying where agentic patterns, data utilization, or autonomous workflows can unlock customer value, and translate those recommendations into staffed, executable work.
Establish architecture patterns, engineering standards, and operating rhythms specific to your problem domain.
Document tradeoffs, rationale, and implementation guidance to help teams move faster and make consistent decisions.
Collaborate across the broader org to share learnings, validate approaches, and accelerate adoption of patterns that work.