Principal, AI Deployment Strategist, FDE

ServiceNow•New York, NY

16h•$221,200 - $387,100•Hybrid

About The Position

ServiceNow's Applied AI Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team is an entrepreneurial, fast-growing function at the center of ServiceNow's shift to AI-native. This team partners directly with C-suite buyers to translate ambiguous business problems into production-grade agentic builds that impact revenue, cost, and customer experience. The Principal, AI Deployment Strategy role is responsible for determining where the FDE organization deploys its talent for maximum impact. This role sits at the intersection of the FDE engagement portfolio, global capacity, and critical Go-To-Market (GTM), sales, and product relationships. The individual will calibrate FDE resource allocation against the highest-leverage customer, product, and market opportunities. This is a strategist-operator role focused on solving deployment decisions, capacity constraints, and scaling paths at an expert level. The ideal candidate has experience across GTM, value engineering, and delivery, with executive presence to engage senior sales and product leadership.

Requirements

12+ years of experience spanning AI GTM, applied AI or technical solutioning, management consulting, or strategic delivery in a Fortune 500 environment.
A track record of personally owning complex, multi-stakeholder GTM and deployment decisions with C-suite and senior executive partners (ownership, not coordination).
Demonstrated fluency in agentic AI, LLM-based systems, or applied AI builds, with enough technical depth to challenge scope, pressure-test architecture, and credibly engage customer and internal engineering leadership.
Experience designing and scaling commercial frameworks, capacity models, or strategic allocation constructs that have held up under CFO and procurement scrutiny.
A history of managing portfolios or programs that have scaled beyond individual reach, with resource allocation decisions that moved the needle across a region or function.
The judgment to know which deployment decision in the portfolio deserves your time and the operating instinct to solve it without waiting for a directive.
Comfort with ambiguity and speed.

Responsibilities

Own the global FDE portfolio and allocation strategy, calibrating where FDE delivers the most impact on revenue, product signal, and customer reference value.
Run the investment thesis that positions the FDE team in the highest-conviction customer, product, and GTM moments.
Navigate competing priorities across regions, portfolios, and strategic accounts to maximize team impact globally.
Treat every FDE engagement as an investment, approving only work tied to a clear strategic imperative or commercial outcome (renewal, net-new ACV, or key product expansion).
Set approval criteria that hold up under CFO scrutiny, lock scope, success criteria, and target outcomes before work begins, and track engagements through to results.
Measure renewals, net-new ACV, consumption, and expansion influenced per FDE-week, by engagement type, region, and industry, to steer future deployments and headcount scaling.
Compress the time from use case identification to value defined, aligned to token burn, and executive-signed-off.
Build and scale a repeatable playbook for engagements to move from 'interesting problem' to 'approved investment with quantified outcomes' rapidly.
Own emerging initiatives that define FDE's next frontier (agentic use cases, GTM motions, industry verticals, platform capabilities) and build scale paths.
Recognize when an initiative is ready to scale, needs more signal, or should be archived.
Define and manage the partner motion to extend FDE reach without diluting caliber, including vetting standards, engagement models, and guardrails for partners.
Drive how FDE impact is communicated at the highest altitudes (board narratives, Financial Analyst Day, C-suite QBRs, marquee customer references).
Stay close to the field to read AI market signals in real time and ensure the team is leaning into what's landing and pulling back from what isn't.
Pattern-match across the portfolio and solve the highest-leverage deployment decisions weekly.