Senior Applied Research Scientist

Company Description

It all started in sunny San Diego, California in 2004 when a visionary engineer, Fred Luddy, saw the potential to transform how we work. Fast forward to today — ServiceNow stands as a global market leader, bringing innovative AI-enhanced technology to over 8,100 customers, including 85% of the Fortune 500®. Our intelligent cloud-based platform seamlessly connects people, systems, and processes to empower organizations to find smarter, faster, and better ways to work. But this is just the beginning of our journey. Join us as we pursue our purpose to make the world work better for everyone.

Job Description

• Tackle real-world problems in document understanding and enterprise workflows by applying your AI/ML expertise and GenAI intuition to identify and adapt the best existing models and techniques.
• Conduct applied research and build prototypes to evaluate the effectiveness of large language models, multimodal models, and document intelligence systems on complex enterprise tasks.
• Contribute to the design and development of the Document Intelligence Platform—a foundational capability enabling intelligent workflows across ServiceNow.
• Investigate techniques such as information extraction, document layout understanding, OCR post-processing, grounding, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
• Collaborate daily with developers, research scientists, product managers, and quality engineers to shape scalable solutions that balance innovation and reliability.
• Own your work from ideation to experimentation and handoff for productionization, with a focus on impactful and explainable outcomes.
• Leverage your understanding of the ServiceNow Agentic Framework to integrate GenAI capabilities into intelligent enterprise workflows.
• Apply your familiarity with Glide, Java, and JavaScript development on the ServiceNow platform to prototype and productionize solutions effectively.

Qualifications

To be successful in this role you have:

• 3+ years of experience in applied machine learning or AI research, ideally with exposure to GenAI, document intelligence, or NLP at scale.
• Experience working with or adapting large foundation models (e.g., LLMs, vision-language models), with a focus on prompting, orchestration, evaluation, and task-specific adaptation (fine-tuning experience is not required).
• Working knowledge of JavaScript, especially in the context of enterprise platform development.
• Proficiency in Python and familiarity with modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, along with tools like Hugging Face, LangChain, or similar orchestration frameworks.
• Strong understanding of document AI, including techniques for text extraction, layout-aware processing, entity linking, and semantic retrieval.
• Ability to design evaluation pipelines, create high-quality benchmarks, and define metrics for relevance, grounding, hallucination, and other model behaviors.
• Strong problem-solving skills and comfort working with ambiguous or noisy enterprise data.
• Passion for innovation and staying current with the state of the art in AI and machine learning.
• Clear communicator and collaborative team player, able to work closely with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Familiarity with Glide and JavaScript development within the ServiceNow platform.
• Understanding of the ServiceNow Agentic Framework and its role in GenAI and document intelligence integrations.

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $158,500 - $269,500, plus equity (when applicable), variable/incentive compensation and benefits. Sales positions generally offer a competitive On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive compensation structure. Please note that the base pay shown is a guideline, and individual total compensation will vary based on factors such as qualifications, skill level, competencies, and work location. We also offer health plans, including flexible spending accounts, a 401(k) Plan with company match, ESPP, matching donations, a flexible time away plan and family leave programs. Compensation is based on the geographic location in which the role is located and is subject to change based on work location.

Additional Information

Work Personas

We approach our distributed world of work with flexibility and trust. Work personas (flexible, remote, or required in office) are categories that are assigned to ServiceNow employees depending on the nature of their work and their assigned work location. Learn more here. To determine eligibility for a work persona, ServiceNow may confirm the distance between your primary residence and the closest ServiceNow off