Principal AI Platform Engineer

ServiceNow•Santa Clara, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

This is a rare chance to lead the technical direction of one of the fastest-growing, most strategic businesses at ServiceNow. CRM & Industry Workflows is where the company is investing to win, and agentic AI is at the center of that bet — reshaping how customers run sales automation, CPQ, customer service, and field service. As Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, you are the lead architect for the FDE group within CRM & Industry Engineering: the person who turns that ambition into working solutions in front of real customers. This is a customer-facing engineering role. You work directly with ServiceNow customers to analyze their business and AI use cases, design agentic solutions on the ServiceNow platform, and deploy them into production. As the most senior technical member of the group, you set the solution architecture and deployment patterns the FDE team reuses across engagements, and you own the correctness, reliability, and business outcomes of the agentic systems the group delivers. Your work compounds: the patterns you establish are adopted across a growing team and a growing customer base, and your influence extends back into the ServiceNow platform itself. The role rewards proximity to the customer and soundness of judgment over volume of code. Agentic solutions behave probabilistically rather than deterministically, so value concentrates in framing the right use cases, designing solutions that hold up in production, and verifying that autonomous behavior matches customer intent. You will spend more time with customers — in discovery, solutioning, and deployment — than on any other activity, and you will raise the whole group’s ability to do the same. For a senior engineer who wants to shape an emerging discipline, build a team’s technical foundation, and see their impact scale with the business, the growth runway is significant.

Requirements

A demonstrated track record of designing, deploying, and operating production software and AI solutions in customer-facing settings, with clear evidence of leading complex engagements to successful business outcomes.
As a Principal Engineer, this person is a recognized technical authority who is highly autonomous: they set the multi-engagement technical strategy and architecture standards the FDE group follows, drive their own agenda in alignment with org goals, navigate organizational ambiguity confidently, and coach senior engineers.
Customer-facing solution delivery. Extensive experience working directly with customers to analyze needs, architect solutions, and deploy them to production — in a forward-deployed, professional services, solution architecture, or comparable delivery role.
Agentic AI and applied ML. Hands-on experience designing and operating autonomous agent systems — planning, tool invocation, memory, context design, and guardrails — and a working command of the LLM behavior, evaluation, and failure modes needed to reason about and verify agentic solutions in production. This is not an AI research or foundation-model role.
Solution architecture and integration. Expert-level system design makes sound architecture and sequencing decisions under uncertainty, designs end-to-end solutions across systems and data, and judges what to build, buy, or configure to meet the outcome. Defines architectural patterns that hold across multiple customer engagements.
Verification, security, and reliability. A disciplined, skeptical eye for whether output meets intent, plus working knowledge of the security and reliability risks specific to AI-integrated systems and how to control them with concrete, least-privilege practices, monitoring, and rollback.
Customer engagement and communication. Excellent communication and stakeholder skills — able to run discovery and working sessions, influence customer technical and executive audiences, and clearly convey capabilities, limitations, tradeoffs, and risk.
Technical leadership. A record of leading and coaching engineers — including senior engineers — setting reusable technical standards across teams and elevating the delivery capability of a group rather than only individual output.
Education. Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. Advanced degrees or relevant certifications are a plus but do not substitute for demonstrated ability to deliver reliable AI solutions to customers.
Years of Experience. 15 years of related experience with a bachelor’s degree in computer science; or 12 years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with 8 years’ experience; or equivalent experience. Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. Advanced degrees or relevant certifications are a plus but are not a substitute for demonstrated ability to ship reliable software with AI-native practices.

Nice To Haves

ServiceNow platform and CRM & Industry domain. Knowledge of the ServiceNow platform and the CRM & Industry domains this role serves — sales automation, CPQ, customer service, and field service — is preferred but not mandatory.

Responsibilities

Analyze customer use cases. Work directly with customer business and technical teams to understand their processes, data, and goals across sales automation, CPQ, customer service, and field service, and translate ambiguous problem statements into well-scoped agentic AI use cases with clear success criteria.
Architect the solution. Design agentic AI solutions on the ServiceNow platform — agent workflows, tool and system integrations, data and context design, and guardrails — that fit cleanly into the customer’s existing landscape and deliver measurable outcomes.
Deploy into production. Own the path from design to live deployment: build and configure the solution, integrate with customer systems, validate behavior against intent, and shepherd it through the customer’s environment into production use.
Set the technical strategy and standards for the group. Define the multi-engagement technical direction, reference architectures, reusable deployment patterns, and solution accelerators the FDE team applies across customers, so successful engagements scale rather than being rebuilt each time.
Be the customer’s trusted technical advisor. Serve as the senior engineering voice in customer conversations — from working sessions to executive discussions — clearly communicating what agentic AI can and cannot do, the tradeoffs involved, and how to adopt it responsibly.
Verify quality, reliability, and safety. Confirm that deployed agents are correct, secure, and reliable: validate edge cases and failure modes, guard against risks such as prompt injection and data leakage, and put monitoring and rollback in place for behavioral drift in production.
Lead the FDE group technically. Provide architectural direction, review, and mentorship across the group’s engagements, unblocking the hardest technical problems and raising the overall standard of solutioning and delivery.
Close the loop with product and engineering. Feed field learnings — recurring use cases, gaps, and platform friction — back into ServiceNow product and engineering to improve the platform for CRM & Industry customers at large.