Principal Software Engineer

ServiceNow•Santa Clara, CA

6d•$221,200 - $387,100•Hybrid

About The Position

We are looking for an experienced Principal Software Engineer to own the end-to-end architecture of the platform that manages how our customers are licensed, metered, and billed for their subscriptions. This platform is the system of record for customer entitlements, usage measurement, overage calculation, and invoicing across the customer lifecycle — spanning finance, sales, engineering, and customer-facing experience. At our scale, this is fundamentally a distributed systems problem: metering usage in real time across an evolving catalog of consumption-based and subscription pricing models, with strict requirements for accuracy, auditability, and low-latency processing. You will be the technical anchor ensuring these systems, owned across many interconnected teams, work coherently as one platform.

Requirements

12+ years of engineering experience (or equivalent depth), with significant time in distributed systems architecture
Solid backend development experience in Java, Python, Go or equivalent, used in production at scale.
Domain expertise in billing, licensing, or metering systems, with working knowledge of how these translate across finance, sales, and engineering
Excellent fundamentals in distributed systems — consistency, fault tolerance, idempotency, exactly-once processing, and stream/batch data pipelines, including high-volume telemetry and event ingestion
Solid fundamentals in databases and data modelling — schema design, performance tuning, and trade-offs across OLTP/OLAP stores
Working knowledge of Kubernetes and container orchestration — deployment topologies, scaling and resource management, and operating stateful services in production
Proven experience architecting systems that span multiple teams/orgs with independent ownership boundaries
Proven experience architecting systems that span multiple teams/orgs with clearly defined ownership boundaries
Excellent hands-on engineering ability — comfortable prototyping, validating architectural decisions through code, and contributing directly on critical-path components
Ability to operate as a Principal IC by leading through technical credibility, collaboration, and influence rather than formal authority

Nice To Haves

Experience with enterprise SaaS licensing or subscription-management platforms
Experience with usage-based billing integrations
Experience designing or evolving pricing/metering models for AI, agentic, or MCP-based products
Familiarity with M&A technical integration — bringing acquired products' usage/billing data into an existing platform

Responsibilities

Define and drive the technical vision and end-to-end architecture for the entitlement, usage metering, overage, and billing platform
Define and maintain the data model and integration contracts across finance, sales/CRM, engineering, and customer-facing portals — and resolve cross-system risks such as data consistency, latency, and ownership gaps before they surface as production or billing issues
Design for correctness under business-calendar constraints — billing cycles, dispute SLAs, and reconciliation windows
Own production reliability for the platform — participate in on-call, guide root-cause analysis, and resolve systemic issues rather than applying one-off patches
Shape billing and metering strategy for AI-driven products — including token-based consumption, agentic workflows, and MCP-based agent actions
Guide teams through complex technical decisions and design reviews, establishing architecture standards for changes that touch the shared platform, and mentor senior/staff engineers on system design and cross-team tradeoffs
Partner with Product, Finance, Sales Operations, and Engineering leadership to align platform roadmap with business needs