Principal Software Engineer - Ai

Role Overview

ServiceNow is seeking a Principal Architect to define and drive the technical architecture and long-term evolution of its Core Platform. The Core Platform provides the foundational capabilities that power ServiceNow applications and enable customers to build, customize, integrate, and operate mission-critical workflows at enterprise scale.

In this role, you will provide technical leadership across multiple platform domains, shape architectural strategy, and drive solutions to the most complex engineering challenges involving scalability, performance, reliability, security, extensibility, and operational efficiency. You will partner with engineering and product leaders to translate business and customer needs into a coherent platform architecture and lead the execution of strategic, cross-organizational technical initiatives.

The ideal candidate is a recognized technical leader with deep expertise in large-scale distributed systems and enterprise platforms, exceptional architectural judgment, and a proven ability to influence engineering strategy and deliver measurable outcomes across teams.

Key Responsibilities

1. Platform Architecture and Technical Strategy

• Define and evolve the long-term architecture and technical strategy for ServiceNow Core Platform, ensuring foundational capabilities support enterprise scale, extensibility, security, performance, and reliability.

• Own architectural direction across multiple platform domains, establishing principles, standards, and design patterns that promote consistency and reduce complexity.

• Drive resolution of the most challenging architectural problems, balancing customer requirements, platform evolution, engineering efficiency, and long-term maintainability.

• Identify opportunities to simplify and modernize platform architecture, reduce technical debt, and improve separation of concerns across foundational services.

• Influence platform roadmaps and investment decisions through clear architectural recommendations, technical analysis, and measurable business and customer outcomes.

2. Scalability, Performance, and Reliability

• Architect solutions that enable the platform to scale efficiently across large numbers of customers, instances, workloads, and diverse usage patterns.

• Drive improvements in runtime architecture, workload isolation, resource utilization, database access, service communication, and execution efficiency.

• Establish architectural approaches for resilience, fault isolation, graceful degradation, and predictable performance under varying workloads.

• Use telemetry, performance data, and production insights to identify systemic bottlenecks and prioritize high-impact architectural improvements.

• Champion engineering practices that prevent customer-impacting regressions and improve service reliability, availability, and operational excellence.

3. Cross-Organizational Technical Leadership

• Lead architecture for strategic initiatives spanning multiple engineering teams and platform domains, driving alignment on technical direction and implementation trade-offs.

• Partner with engineering, product management, security, and operations leaders to translate customer needs and business priorities into actionable architecture and engineering plans.

• Influence senior technical and organizational leaders through strong technical judgment, data-driven analysis, and clear communication.

• Mentor principal and senior engineers and technical leaders, raising the quality of architectural thinking and engineering execution across the organization.

4. Engineering Excellence and Platform Innovation

• Drive architectural improvements that accelerate engineering delivery while maintaining high standards for quality, compatibility, and reliability.

• Champion automation, continuous integration, contract testing, observability, and telemetry-driven engineering practices.

• Identify opportunities to leverage AI and automation in software development, testing, platform operations, and developer productivity.

• Evaluate emerging technologies and architectural approaches, translating promising innovations into practical, scalable platform capabilities.

• Define measurable success criteria for architectural initiatives and ensure outcomes are validated through customer impact, engineering metrics, and operational results.

Department: Engineering, Infrastructure and Operations
Function: Engineering
Experience Level: Not Applicable