Principal Machine Learning Engineer

ServiceNow•Santa Clara, CA

21h•$240,100 - $420,200•Hybrid

About The Position

The Security and Risk Engineering organization builds scalable, AI-powered security solutions that reduce risk and protect ServiceNow and its customers. We value AI-first thinking, clean architecture, intuitive experiences, and a culture of continuous learning. This is a zero-to-one incubation. We’re building a new class of exposure analysis that ranks security work by exploitability—where an attacker could realistically get in—rather than raw severity. The architecture is evolving, and this role helps define what good looks like. As a Principal ML Engineer, you set the technical vision for exploitability-based security across the portfolio—not just one engine. You define the hardest modeling problems worth solving, set the direction other staff and senior engineers build within, and represent the work to executives, customers, and the broader engineering organization.

Requirements

Deep expertise in modern AI/ML with a track record of building production AI systems—LLMs, foundation models, agentic architectures, RAG, retrieval, and model evaluation—alongside probabilistic or ML-driven scoring.
The ability to set a compelling technical vision and drive it across teams, then go deep into architecture and code.
A proven record of turning ambitious, ambiguous ideas into products that scale to enterprise workloads.
An innovator’s mindset—challenging conventional approaches and seizing the openings created by rapidly evolving AI.
Command of distributed systems, APIs, cloud-native platforms, and data or graph systems.
Expert-level Python and modern AI frameworks and infrastructure; experience with Java, Go, or similar languages is valuable.
Executive-level communication: able to articulate a compelling technical vision to engineers, customers, and senior leadership.
Extensive use of AI-native development tools and coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or Windsurf across the software development lifecycle.
15+ years of software engineering experience, including significant technical and engineering leadership responsibility.
Demonstrated experience designing and delivering AI/ML-powered products and platforms in production.
Experience leading technical initiatives spanning multiple teams without direct authority.
Demonstrated ability to design systems that scale to enterprise workloads.
Hands-on experience with frontier LLMs, agent frameworks, retrieval and vector technologies, and model evaluation and observability; probabilistic modeling or graph analytics is a strong plus.
Strong backend engineering experience with distributed systems, APIs, microservices, and cloud-native architectures.
Extensive experience using AI-native development tools and coding agents as part of the software development lifecycle.
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Applied depth in security problems—threat detection, vulnerability and exposure management, identity security, risk prioritization, or autonomous remediation—is strongly preferred.
Cybersecurity products, or deep familiarity with modern security architectures and security operations, is strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority, and turn ambitious ideas into working, enterprise-grade products.
Explore and apply emerging AI to cybersecurity in fundamentally new ways—not simply bolt AI onto existing products.
Represent the team’s technology and innovation with executives, customers, partners, and the broader engineering organization.
Mentor staff and senior engineers, and raise the overall engineering bar through coaching and technical leadership.
Champion AI-native engineering practices, including extensive use of coding agents and autonomous development, testing, evaluation, and operational workflows.
Set the direction for AI safety, security, governance, and guardrails for agentic systems running in production.