Sr. Dir., Architecture and Technology

ServiceNow•Santa Clara, CA

1d•$254,500 - $380,000•Hybrid

About The Position

ServiceNow is seeking a high energy, high EQ executive leader who thrives in a highly cross-functional, rapid velocity environment and has a passion for driving scale, transforming culture, and designing end to end technology solutions for customers and employees who are serving our customers. Our value drivers are to: Wow customers and employees with digital experiences they cannot live without. Create unified, innovative experiences that empower people to feel effective and valued – by bringing together a connected design, a product mindset, and innovative technology. Deliver delightful employee experiences powered by Gen AI that accelerate ServiceNow’s journey to become the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century. Co-creating, using, and highlighting our own products to do it. ServiceNow’s technology makes the world work for everyone, and our people make it possible. We move fast because the world cannot wait, and we innovate in ways no one else can for our customers and communities. We know that your best work happens when you live your best life and share your unique talents, so we do everything we can to make that possible. We dream big together, supporting each other to make our individual and collective dreams come true. The future is ours, and it starts with you. We are not yesterday’s IT department, we're Digital Technology. The world around us keeps changing and so do we. We’re redefining what it means to be IT with a mindset centered on product design, transformation, stellar experiences, AI-driven automation, innovation, and growth. We’re all about delivering delightful, secure customer and employee experiences that accelerate ServiceNow’s journey to become the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century. As the Sr. Director, Solutions Architecture, you will lead a global team of Solutions Architects, work closely with product managers, engineers, and business leaders to define the architecture, technology stack, and integration points for enterprise systems, applications, and platforms. You will work across the Connected Customer Experience (CCX) organization and Enterprise Architecture teams to design the overall solution and technical architecture for SNU, Developer ecosystem, Support and Success organizations to enable the best-connected experience for our customers.

Requirements

14+ years in solutions architecture, enterprise architecture, or technical leadership — including hands-on solution design and delivery, not just oversight.
7+ years leading architecture or engineering teams in large-scale, cross-functional environments ($5B+ revenue companies).
Demonstrated experience delivering solution architecture artifacts that directly shaped build/buy/configure decisions or platform investments — with traceable outcomes.
Experience leading structured vendor evaluations and POCs — including writing POC scope documents, defining measurable success criteria, and producing decision-ready recommendations.
Deep fluency in integration architecture patterns, data flow modeling, microservices design, and platform-native solution development.
Familiarity with data governance and privacy requirements (GDPR, CCPA, or equivalent) as architectural constraints — not just compliance considerations.
Experience designing and shipping commercial or enterprise SaaS/PaaS applications — including platform decisions that affected product roadmap.
Demonstrated experience leading AI or Gen AI transformation within a technical practice — not just deploying AI tools, but changing how the team designs and delivers.
Hands-on experience with AI/ML integration in enterprise systems — you have architected systems that use AI, not just described how AI could be used. You understand where AI creates leverage and where it introduces risk.
Experience with ServiceNow platform architecture and products.
Experience leading architecture in Agile delivery environments — including maintaining architectural integrity under sprint-cycle pressure.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
Strategic problem framing: You define problems before proposing solutions. When given a business challenge, your first move is to reframe it at the right level of abstraction — not jump to technology.
Quantified risk articulation: You express architectural risk in business terms: cost of delay, probability of failure, revenue impact. 'This is a high-risk approach' is not sufficient.
Executive communication under pressure: You can defend architectural decisions to skeptical senior executives without becoming defensive or deferential. You change positions based on logic, not authority.
AI transformation leadership: You have a theory of change for how AI reshapes solution architecture. You can articulate what the team needs to stop doing as clearly as what it needs to start doing.

Responsibilities

Own solution architecture across the CCX domain — including integration architecture, data flows, platform-native patterns, and microservices design.
Produce architecture decision records (ADRs) that document not just what was decided, but what was rejected and why. Every significant design decision should be traceable.
Lead design reviews and technical assessments with clear criteria — not subjective feedback. Pass/fail should be apparent before the review, not after.
Surface systemic risks before they reach production. Bottlenecks and failure modes belong in your architecture artifacts, not in incident retrospectives.
Partner with Enterprise Strategy to consume roadmap direction and feed back implementation-level constraints that affect strategic planning.
Understand the footprint of the CCx platform and lead integrations E2E, from evaluation, assessment to production.
Define POC scope documents before any vendor engagement begins. Scope must include: business hypothesis being tested, success criteria with measurable thresholds, constraints (time, cost, integration boundaries), and explicit exclusions.
Design POCs that test the assumption most likely to fail — not the vendor's best-case demo scenario. If a capability cannot be validated under realistic conditions, the POC has not done its job.
Produce vendor evaluation outputs that are decision-ready: structured comparison against criteria, risk assessment per option, and a clear recommendation with rationale. 'It depends' is not an output.
Maintain an evaluation framework your team can reuse — so each successive POC builds institutional knowledge rather than starting from scratch.
Ensure POC documentation is complete enough that a team member who was not involved can understand what was tested, what was found, and what was decided.
Drive alignment between solution design and business requirements across product managers, engineers, and business leaders.
Translate complex technical decisions into business-framed options for senior stakeholders — not technology summaries, but choice architectures with tradeoffs.
Evaluate and recommend technology stacks, vendor solutions, and integration strategies with quantified risk and cost assessments.
Maintain a working partnership with Enterprise Strategy — surfacing implementation constraints early enough to shape their planning, not after commitments are made.