Principal, AI Deployment Strategist, FDE

ServiceNow•New York, NY

2d•Remote

About The Position

ServiceNow's Applied AI Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team is an entrepreneurial, fast-growing, fast-moving function at the center of ServiceNow's shift to AI-native. This team sits at the front lines of the most strategic agentic engagements in the Fortune 500, partnering directly with C-suite buyers to translate ambiguous business problems into production-grade agentic builds that move the needle on revenue, cost, and customer experience. The central technical function ensures market demand is met at pace, scaling without sacrificing production fidelity, and feeding signals from frontier customer work back into the ServiceNow product ecosystem. The Principal, AI Deployment Strategy role owns where the FDE organization deploys its talent for maximum impact. This role sits at the seam between the portfolio of engagements, global capacity, and critical Go-To-Market (GTM), sales, and product relationships. The individual will calibrate how FDE resources are allocated against the highest-leverage customer, product, and market opportunities. This is a strategist-operator role, not a coordinator's, where every deployment decision, capacity constraint, and scale path is to be solved at an expert caliber. The ideal candidate has experience across GTM, value technical value, and delivery, and possesses the 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.
Sufficient 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.
Experience making resource allocation decisions that moved the needle across a region or function.
The judgment to know which deployment decision in the portfolio deserves attention 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, working with regional leadership, Geo Presidents, and SVP/GTM to calibrate 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.
Deploy FDE capacity like capital, treating every FDE engagement as an investment.
Approve only work tied to a clear strategic imperative or commercial outcome: a renewal, net-new ACV, or a key product expansion.
Set approval criteria that hold up under CFO scrutiny, lock scope, success criteria, and target outcomes before work starts, 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 FDE deployment and scale headcount or partner capacity.
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.
Stay close to portfolio performance to 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 SIs and specialist partners.
Drive how FDE impact is communicated at the highest levels (board narratives, Financial Analyst Day, C-suite QBRs, marquee customer references).
Own the narrative from raw deployment and build outcomes to the story that moves markets, analysts, and pipeline.
Stay close to the field to read market signals in real time and drive internal alignment for the team to lean into what's landing and pull back from what isn't.
Pattern-match across the portfolio, identify high-leverage deployment decisions, and solve them at an expert level.