Staff AI Engineer - Conversational & Agentic AI

ServiceNow•Santa Clara, CA

2d•$176,100 - $308,200•Hybrid

About The Position

The Agentic Engineering organization at ServiceNow is the customer-obsessed engineering group that builds a conversational AI experience that turns enterprise intent into completed work. We advance how enterprise AI reasons, remembers, and executes. The Agent Orchestration team — the team you'll join — owns the execution core: the agent harness, orchestration runtime, multi-agent coordination, memory management, and the evaluation frameworks that ensure agents behave correctly in production. Every autonomous action Otto promises depends on what this team ships. By joining our team, you’ll be at the forefront of our AI transformation journey, backed by the global scale of ServiceNow and the agility of a high-growth environment. We are looking for world-class talent to help us extend agentic AI to every employee across every corner of the business.

Requirements

7+ years building production software systems with a strong track record on reliability, performance, and scalability
Hands-on experience shipping generative AI products — not just integrating LLM APIs or building prototypes, but owning AI-powered features that production users depend on
Solid depth in how large language models work: failure modes, context constraints, and how prompt design shapes model behavior at scale
Practical prompt engineering experience: systematically designing, versioning, and evaluating prompts across model updates or A/B evaluation cycles
A real track record in eval engineering — not just familiarity, but a portfolio of evaluation suites designed, shipped, and used to drive quality decisions in production AI systems
Cost and efficiency awareness at the system level: experience reasoning about model routing, inference cost, and latency tradeoffs in production
Strong software engineering fundamentals: distributed systems, API design, and testing discipline
Comfort operating in fast-moving, ambiguous, startup-like AI product environments

Nice To Haves

Experience with multi-agent coordination patterns (A2A, MCP)
Familiarity with agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar)
Prior experience shipping AI systems in enterprise software
Experience with AI observability tooling (tracing, cost tracking, LLM-specific monitoring)
Familiarity with cloud-native infrastructure, service observability, logging, monitoring, reliability engineering, and production troubleshooting

Responsibilities

Design and build the agent execution harness — the orchestration layer that routes inputs, manages context, invokes tools, handles retries, and surfaces execution state across multi-step agentic workflows
Own the runtime's fault tolerance, latency, and throughput; design for enterprise workflows that cannot fail silently or unpredictably
Instrument the harness with tracing, cost attribution, and latency visibility so the team can reason about agent behavior in production and catch failures before customers do
Build prompt management systems — versioning, templating, and systematic evaluation — that keep agent behavior stable across model updates and configuration changes
Design and own evaluation frameworks (unit evals, integration evals, production monitors) that measure agent quality, catch regressions, and drive data-informed decisions
Integrate with and abstract over frontier LLMs, managing model routing, fallback strategies, cost, and latency trade - offs in production
Set technical standards through architecture decisions, code reviews, and coaching — particularly on agentic design patterns and production AI discipline.
Define where agent logic lives — what's a tool call, a sub-agent, a hardcoded path, or a human escalation — and establish those design standards across the team