Principal Software Engineer
ServiceNow2 months ago
Base Salary
$199k - $348k/yr
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction and own architecture for model-driven, agentic, and conversational HR capabilities.
- Design agent decomposition, context assembly, tool exposure, autonomy boundaries, model migrations, orchestration, and build-versus-adopt decisions.
- Build versioned, upgrade-safe instruction and tool-description contracts with extension points, deprecation paths, and compatibility guarantees.
- Own evaluation infrastructure including golden datasets, multi-turn suites, judge calibration, CI gates, and drift detection.
- Design production observability and safety controls for hallucinations, tool-selection errors, unsafe actions, prompt injection, access violations, and restricted HR conversation content.
- Define standards and verification practices for accountable AI-assisted engineering.
- Remain hands-on with difficult integrations, risky migrations, architectural prototypes, and incident resolution.
- Collaborate with product, engineering, and design teams to deliver scalable AI solutions and translate business needs into technical designs.
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience with technical direction adopted beyond the immediate team.
- Hands-on experience authoring agentic instructions and prompts, designing autonomous workflows, and building evaluations for them.
- Production experience with LLM APIs, retrieval-grounded features, agent orchestration, tool and function calling, structured output enforcement, and at least one production model or orchestration migration.
- Experience implementing entitlement-aware retrieval and tool layers, role-based scope separation, and restricted-record handling under audit.
- Evaluation experience involving dataset curation, judge calibration, CI gating, and drift detection used by other engineers.
- Strong system design, API, data modeling, testing, front-end, server-side, and relational data experience.
- Experience using AI coding assistants and agents accountably.
- On-call and incident-command experience for customer-facing systems, including ownership of systemic fixes.
- Experience with Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, and React, with the ability to learn new tools and frameworks quickly.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Preferred: HR domain experience in case management, employee journeys, lifecycle, payroll, benefits, leave, or absence.
- Preferred: experience integrating core HR, payroll, or benefits systems of record, including reconciliation and eventual-consistency patterns.
- Preferred: contribution in a Forward deployment model to support customer adoption.
Benefits
- Base pay is listed at $199,100-$348,400, plus equity when applicable, variable/incentive compensation, and benefits.
- Health plans, flexible spending accounts, a 401(k) plan with company match, ESPP, matching donations, flexible time away, and family leave programs are offered.
- The role uses a flexible work persona within the company's distributed work model.
- Employee type is regular, and the region is North America and Canada.
Tech Stack
Categories
About ServiceNow
ServiceNow builds a cloud platform for enterprise digital workflows, covering IT service management, customer service, HR service delivery, security operations, and operations management, plus tools for custom app development. It sells subscription SaaS to large organizations and public-sector agencies to automate processes and connect data across systems. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, ServiceNow is a public company listed on the NYSE under the ticker NOW.