Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer

ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join AI Engineering and Delivery in building production-grade agentic AI systems and enterprise-scale search capabilities. The work supports Now Assist, AI Agents, and AI-driven experiences, with an emphasis on grounded reasoning using ServiceNow data, trust and safety, and model integration and evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and help build production-grade agentic AI systems embedded across ServiceNow’s platform.
• Design and ship multi-agent systems, including orchestration, tool use, planning loops, memory, and failure recovery, with reliable behavior in production environments.
• Build agents that use ServiceNow’s data layer, including CMDB, Workflow Data Fabric, and the Knowledge Graph, to enable decision-making grounded in contextual enterprise information.
• Own deployment guardrails through observability, human-in-the-loop controls, and compliance infrastructure for safe scaling of autonomous systems.
• Partner with the search team to ensure agents rely on accurate, low-latency retrieval, including RAG pipelines, hybrid search, re-ranking, and evaluation as a key dependency for agentic quality.
• Integrate frontier models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI into the Sense Decide Act Govern architecture and evaluate trade-offs across cost, latency, and capability.
• Establish architectural patterns for the group, make hard design decisions, lead design reviews, and raise the production AI discipline level across engineers and principals.
• Design scalable and robust architectures capable of scale deployment across hyperscalers and ServiceNow infrastructure.
• Apply emerging model capabilities to real customer problems with a short timeline.

Requirements

• 6+ years of software engineering with strong foundations in data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience 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.
• Demonstrated technical leadership, including architecture ownership, raising code quality expectations, 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 related to 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

Compensation and Location

• Location: Santa Clara, CA (onsite)
• Salary: USD 201,300 - 352,300 per year
• Base pay: $201,300 - $352,300 (plus equity when applicable, variable/incentive compensation and benefits)

Benefits

• Health plans, including flexible spending accounts
• 401(k) Plan with company match
• ESPP
• Matching donations
• Flexible time away plan
• Family leave programs

Work Personas

Work persona categories (flexible, remote, or required in office) may be assigned based on the nature of the work and your 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, 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.