Principal Design Technologist, Design Systems & Applied AI

ServiceNow•Santa Clara, CA

About The Position

This principal individual-contributor role sits within ServiceNow’s Product Design team and focuses on making design-system standards easier to understand, test, and implement. The role translates standards and design files into clear specifications, design-owned coded reference components, validation tools, and implementation guidance that demonstrate intended experiences before Engineering builds and maintains production implementations. The Principal Design Technologist uses deep design and web-development expertise to create coded explorations of component quality, behavior, and AI-enabled interactions. The role also mentors product designers who use code to explore and communicate concepts, and contributes practical insight to the development and adoption of AI-assisted design tools. The position leads through expertise and influence; Product and Engineering retain ownership of product strategy, technical architecture, production code, roadmaps, and delivery.

Requirements

Experience contributing throughout the product development process for web or software products.
Experience in user experience design, product design, design systems, design technology, prototyping, or a related field.
Experience working with cross-functional teams across Product, Design, Accessibility, and Engineering.

Nice To Haves

12+ years of experience in product design, design systems, design technology, prototyping, or a related discipline within complex, enterprise-scale products.
A portfolio or body of work demonstrating systems thinking, interaction and visual craft, and the ability to turn design standards into reusable guidance, reference components, and tools.
Hands-on experience with modern UI frameworks such as Lit and Web Components, including building coded prototypes and design-owned reference components that demonstrate intended appearance and behavior.
Deep knowledge of design systems, including components, patterns, design tokens, themes, accessibility, responsive behavior, localization, governance, and contribution processes.
Experience using AI to improve design work, such as helping teams find guidance, create and review design-system content, check quality, or automate repeatable tasks.
Experience defining appropriate human review and responsible-use practices.
Experience using or extending design tools such as Figma, documentation platforms, component catalogs, analytics, plugins, or automated design-quality and accessibility checks.
Demonstrated success setting direction and influencing senior partners across Design, Product, Engineering, Accessibility, and AI in a complex, distributed organization.
Excellent communication, facilitation, storytelling, critique, and mentoring skills, with a record of helping a broad design organization adopt AI tools, shared standards, and new ways of working.

Responsibilities

Work with Product Design, Product Management, and Engineering to set direction for design-system tools and practices that improve quality and adoption across Platform and business units.
Create and maintain design-owned coded UI reference libraries based on design-system standards and source designs, including Figma where applicable.
Demonstrate component states, interactions, responsive behavior, accessibility expectations, and design-token usage through reference components.
Evaluate and create AI-assisted tools that help teams find, apply, and check design-system guidance.
Define practical methods for assessing whether AI-assisted tools are accurate, useful, understandable, and aligned with approved standards.
Partner with front-end engineering teams to identify recurring differences between approved designs and delivered experiences.
Create design-side review and validation methods that surface issues earlier, and use implementation learnings to improve shared standards, reference components, and guidance.
Lead adoption of AI tools across Design by evaluating emerging tools, establishing responsible working practices, and providing playbooks, demonstrations, workshops, and peer learning.
Mentor and connect product designers who use code to prototype AI experiences; establish shared practices, align explorations with the design system, and turn useful lessons into reusable guidance.
Collaborate with Product Management and Engineering on a contribution process for proposing, reviewing, and maintaining design-system guidance and reference materials across Design, Engineering, Product, Accessibility, Platform, and business units.
Partner with Design Enablement and Engineering Operations to help front-end UI engineers use the design system effectively.
Contribute design-system onboarding, training, implementation guidance, reference examples, and validation practices.