Principal Software Engineer

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

About the Team:  

The Intelligent Workflow Engineering organization is at the core of ServiceNow’s Automation and AI-native Platform vision. We design and deliver the next generation of flow orchestration, automation, and decisioning capabilities that power how enterprises digitize and optimize their work. Our portfolio includes foundational products such as Flow Designer and the Flow Engine, Process Automation Designer, Playbooks, Decision Management, RPA and WebAgent Automations, Process and Task Mining, Notifications, Adoption Services, and Document Management. Together, these form the Automation suite — the backbone of how customers build, run, and scale automations on the Now Platform. We combine deep expertise in workflow execution, AI-driven orchestration, and distributed system design to enable the vision of “Anybody can Automate Anything from Anywhere using the Power of AI”. Our systems are the execution fabric behind billions of transactions daily, integrating AI, analytics, and intelligent decisioning to deliver hyper-scalable, reliable, and data-aware automation experiences for our customers. 

The Opportunity: Principal Software Engineer 

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help define, architect, and build the next-generation Workflow Automation Engine that powers the Now Platform and help accelerate our vision for Intelligent enterprise automations of the future.  

In this hands-on, highly technical leadership role, you will be a key driver in scaling our Flow Engine, orchestration framework, and automation intelligence stack to support complex, AI-native enterprise workloads. You’ll lead cross-functional initiatives that blend workflow automation, agentic AI, and process intelligence, shaping how our customers design and execute automations with simplicity and intelligence. You’ll influence system architecture, performance optimization, and reliability strategies across Flow Designer, Process Automation Designer, Playbooks, and RPA and our other offerings. This is a unique opportunity to operate at the intersection of large-scale backend engineering and applied AI, working with world-class engineers and researchers to push the boundaries of automation. Your work will directly impact how thousands of our customers create, manage, and optimize workflows — making the Now Platform faster, smarter, and more autonomous. 

What you get to do in this role:

• Lead the architecture, design, and evolution of our core backend and workflow engine frameworks, ensuring they are highly scalable, performant, and resilient across millions of transactions and automation flows. 

• Drive major initiatives related to the integration of AI, automation, and flow orchestration into our platform’s core engine, enabling next-generation intelligent workflows. 

• Evaluate, design, and champion distributed systems architectures, messaging frameworks, and data persistence strategies that ensure low-latency, high-throughput performance at enterprise scale. 

• Mentor and guide engineers across multiple teams, fostering a culture of technical depth, performance-first thinking, and engineering excellence. 

• Collaborate with product managers, architects, and UI engineers to translate complex workflow and automation requirements into elegant, extensible, and fault-tolerant backend systems. 

• Champion observability, reliability, and efficiency through strong design principles, metrics-driven performance tuning, and advanced debugging practices. 

• Build high-quality, clean, modular, and reusable code by enforcing best practices around system design, API contracts, testing, and code reviews. 

• Work with product owners and AI/automation leads to own features end-to-end — from architectural design and performance modeling to deployment and continuous optimization. 

• Design and implement backend services that empower customers to build, execute, and monitor complex workflows at scale, while ensuring extensibility and configurability. 

• Contribute to the design and implementation of new workflow engine features and per