Principal Software Engineer
ServiceNow5 days ago
Base Salary
$221k - $387k/yr
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction for model-driven HRSD capabilities, agentic experiences, and conversational AI architecture.
- Own agent decomposition and composition, context assembly, tool exposure, autonomy delegation, model selection and migration, orchestration, and build-versus-adopt decisions.
- Define structural human-review boundaries for sensitive HR actions involving pay, employment status, restricted records, and employee-relations matters.
- Create versioned, upgrade-safe instruction and tool-description contracts with extension points, deprecation paths, and compatibility guarantees.
- Build evaluation infrastructure including golden datasets, multi-turn suites, judge calibration, CI gates, and drift detection.
- Design production observability for hallucinations, tool-selection errors, unsafe actions, containment, and prompt-injection vectors without exposing restricted HR conversation content.
- Establish AI-assisted engineering specifications, review expectations, and verification harnesses.
- Contribute hands-on to difficult integrations, risky migrations, architectural prototypes, and incidents.
- Partner 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 evaluation systems.
- 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, restricted-record handling, and audit requirements.
- Evaluation experience involving dataset curation, judge calibration, CI gating, and drift detection used by other engineers.
- Strong command of system design, APIs, data modeling, and testing across front-end, server-side, and relational data work.
- Experience using AI coding assistants and agents in an accountable manner.
- On-call and incident-command experience for customer-facing systems, including ownership of systemic fixes.
- Experience with Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, and React, plus 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 expertise in case management, employee journeys and 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 $221,200–$387,100, plus equity when applicable, variable or 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 has a Flexible work persona within a distributed work environment.
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.