Principal Software Engineer - Ai

ServiceNow•Santa Clara, CA

1h•$221,200 - $387,100

About The Position

ServiceNow is seeking a Principal Architect to define and drive the technical architecture and long-term evolution of its Core Platform. The Core Platform provides foundational capabilities for ServiceNow applications and enables customers to build, customize, integrate, and operate mission-critical workflows at enterprise scale. The role provides technical leadership across multiple platform domains, shapes architectural strategy, and addresses complex engineering challenges involving scalability, performance, reliability, security, extensibility, and operational efficiency. The successful candidate will partner with engineering and product leaders to translate business and customer needs into a coherent platform architecture and lead strategic, cross-organizational technical initiatives. The ideal candidate is a recognized technical leader with deep expertise in large-scale distributed systems and enterprise platforms, exceptional architectural judgment, and a track record of influencing engineering strategy and delivering measurable outcomes across teams.

Requirements

Extensive experience designing and evolving large-scale enterprise software platforms, distributed systems, or cloud-based SaaS architectures.
Deep expertise in distributed systems, multi-tenant architectures, runtime platforms, service-oriented architectures, and foundational platform engineering.
Experience applying AI and automation to engineering productivity, software quality, and platform operations.
Experience architecting enterprise SaaS platforms operating at significant scale with extensive customer customization and integration requirements.
Proven ability to define architecture across multiple technical domains and lead complex, cross-team engineering initiatives.
Strong understanding of performance engineering, scalability, reliability, fault isolation, security, and operational resilience.
Deep knowledge of API architecture, platform extensibility, backward compatibility, and integration patterns.
Demonstrated ability to influence engineering strategy and technical decisions across organizational boundaries without direct reporting relationships.
Exceptional architectural judgment, including the ability to evaluate complex trade-offs and translate technical strategy into incremental, executable plans.
Strong communication skills, including explaining complex technical concepts and recommendations to senior engineering and executive leadership.

Responsibilities

Define and evolve the long-term architecture and technical strategy for the ServiceNow Core Platform, ensuring it supports enterprise scale, extensibility, security, performance, and reliability.
Own architectural direction across multiple platform domains and establish principles, standards, and design patterns that promote consistency and reduce complexity.
Resolve challenging architectural problems while balancing customer requirements, platform evolution, engineering efficiency, and long-term maintainability.
Identify opportunities to simplify and modernize platform architecture, reduce technical debt, and improve separation of concerns across foundational services.
Influence platform roadmaps and investment decisions through architectural recommendations, technical analysis, and measurable business and customer outcomes.
Architect solutions that scale efficiently across customers, instances, workloads, and diverse usage patterns.
Drive improvements in runtime architecture, workload isolation, resource utilization, database access, service communication, and execution efficiency.
Establish architectural approaches for resilience, fault isolation, graceful degradation, and predictable performance under varying workloads.
Use telemetry, performance data, and production insights to identify systemic bottlenecks and prioritize architectural improvements.
Champion engineering practices that prevent customer-impacting regressions and improve reliability, availability, and operational excellence.
Lead architecture for strategic initiatives spanning engineering teams and platform domains, aligning teams on technical direction and implementation trade-offs.
Partner with engineering, product management, security, and operations leaders to turn customer needs and business priorities into architecture and engineering plans.
Influence senior technical and organizational leaders through technical judgment, data-driven analysis, and clear communication.
Mentor principal and senior engineers and technical leaders to improve architectural thinking and engineering execution.
Drive architectural improvements that accelerate engineering delivery while maintaining quality, compatibility, and reliability.
Champion automation, continuous integration, contract testing, observability, and telemetry-driven engineering practices.
Identify opportunities to use AI and automation in software development, testing, platform operations, and developer productivity.
Evaluate emerging technologies and architectural approaches and translate promising innovations into practical, scalable platform capabilities.
Define measurable success criteria for architectural initiatives and validate results through customer impact, engineering metrics, and operational outcomes.