Principal AI Native Software Engineer

Company Description

It all started when engineer Fred Luddy wrote code that automated a tedious task for his coworker, Phyllis. She cried tears of joy. That moment inspired Fred to build a company that could do that for everyone—freeing people from busywork so they could focus on meaningful work. Today, ServiceNow is the AI control tower for business reinvention. Our ServiceNow AI platform brings together any AI, any data, and any workflow— helping 85% of the Fortune 500® work smarter, faster, and better. We're building an AI-native culture where technology and talent are unstoppable together. And we're just getting started.

Join us to put AI to work for people.

Job Description

The Team 

The Analytics Intelligence Team is responsible for ServiceNow's Conversational Analytics experience, allowing customers to ask questions about their data in plain language and receive highly accurate analytics.  Initial products include AI Data Explorer and Query Generation.  The immediate future involves making these products fully agentic, considering a centralized semantic layer, knowledge graph, data catalog, and universal context engine. 

The Role 

We're looking for a Principal Engineer to work collaboratively with other architects and engineers to help drive the technical direction for conversational analytics.  They’ll need to go deep on architecture whilst also being an outstanding verbal and written communicator across engineering, product and leadership.  Being able to align competing opinions is a necessary skill. 

The right candidate will be hands on and have a customer mindset, with the ability to rapidly create technical prototypes to demonstrate value.   The role will involve coaching other software engineers of all levels, so it’s important they are not only humble but also have significant hands-on technical depth.

What you get to do in this role:

• Build the best cloud-based AI/ML solutions to power intelligent enterprise services
• Collaborate daily with a team of like-minded developers, product managers to produce quality software
• Work with product owners to understand detailed requirements and own your code from design, implementation, testing and delivery of high-quality solutions to our users

Qualifications

To be successful in this role you have:

• Experience in leveraging or critically thinking about how to integrate AI into work processes, decision-making, or problem-solving. This may include using AI-powered tools, automating workflows, analyzing AI-driven insights, or exploring AI's potential impact on the function or industry.
• 12+ years building and shipping large-scale, production software systems 
• Proficiency in Java, Python, JavaScript, SQL 
• AI Native development experience, utilizing coding tools such as Claude Code 
• Experience with vector-based retrieval, agentic/tool architectures, universal context engines, data catalogs, knowledge graphs, semantic layers 
• Strong focus with customer success metrics, specifically accuracy and associated evaluation frameworks and datasets 
• Proven ability to coach other engineers, with the viewpoint of winning and growing as a team 
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; able to flex between deep technical detail and executive-level framing 
• Experience with BI/Analytics Platforms and NLQ 
• An understanding of the ServiceNow ecosystem, and how it is intentionally different from other tech stacks 

For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $216,100 - $378,200, 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