Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Join ServiceNow within AI Engineering and Delivery to help design and build production-grade agentic AI systems and enterprise-scale search experiences. The work powers capabilities across Now Assist, AI Agents, and AI-driven experiences, with an emphasis on reliable execution, grounded reasoning using ServiceNow data, and trust, safety, and governance.

Location: Santa Clara, CA (onsite)

Compensation: USD 201,300 - 352,300 per year. Base pay may be accompanied by equity when applicable and variable/incentive compensation and benefits.

What you’ll do

• Design, build, and help build production-grade agentic AI systems embedded across ServiceNow’s platform.
• Ship multi-agent systems with orchestration, tool use, planning loops, memory, and failure recovery that operate reliably in production.
• Build agents that use ServiceNow’s data layer, including CMDB, Workflow Data Fabric, and Knowledge Graph, so decisions include enterprise context beyond what frontier models have by default.
• Own the guardrails, including observability, human-in-the-loop controls, and compliance infrastructure for safe deployment at scale.
• Partner with the search team to deliver accurate, low-latency retrieval as a dependency of agentic quality, covering RAG pipelines, hybrid search, re-ranking, and evaluation.
• Integrate frontier models (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI) into the Sense Decide Act Govern architecture, evaluating trade-offs across cost, latency, and capability.
• Set architectural patterns for the group, lead hard design decisions, run design reviews, and raise the bar on production AI discipline for engineers and principals.
• Design scalable, robust architectures that support deployment at scale across hyperscalers and ServiceNow infrastructure.
• Work on emerging model capabilities and apply them to real customer problems with a short timeline.

What you bring

• 6+ years of software engineering with strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
• Hands-on depth designing, shipping, and operating agentic systems in production, including multi-agent orchestration, tool calling, planning loops, memory, and failure recovery.
• Production-grade Python.
• Systems language experience (Go, Java, or C++) is a plus.
• Working experience with frontier AI SDKs (Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI), including prompt engineering, structured outputs, and model evaluation in production settings.
• Familiarity with RAG and retrieval patterns in production, including vector stores, hybrid search, and retrieval evaluation metrics.
• Technical leadership experience, such as architecture ownership, raising code quality, and mentoring engineers on production AI practices.
• Deeper specialization in search and retrieval at scale or MLOps/model observability.
• Published work or open-source contributions in agentic systems or retrieval.
• Exposure to LLM fine-tuning or inference optimization in production.

Technologies

• Python, Go, Java, C++, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI
• CMDB, Workflow Data Fabric, Knowledge Graph
• RAG, hybrid search, vector stores, MCP
• Sense Decide Act Govern architecture

Benefits

• Health plans, including flexible spending accounts
• 401(k) Plan with company match
• ESPP
• Matching donations
• Flexible time away plan
• Family leave programs
• Base pay of $201,300 - $352,300 (plus equity when applicable, variable/incentive compensation and benefits)

Work personas

Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are categories assigned depending on the nature of work and assigned work location. ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow office using a third-party service to determine eligibility for a work persona.

Equal opportunity employer

ServiceNow is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or any other category protected by law. All qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with legal requirements.

Accommodations

If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are unable to use the online application and need an alternative method to apply, please contact [email protected] for assistance.

Export control regulations

For positions requiring access to controlled technology subject to export control regulations, including the U.S. Export Administration Regulations (EAR), ServiceNow may be required to obtain export control approval from government authorities for certain individuals. All employment is contingent upon ServiceNow obtaining any export license or other approval that may be required by relevant export control authorities.