Senior

Senior Staff Applications Development Engineer

Santa Clara, United States · On-site

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

We are the Industry Vertical Engineering team at ServiceNow. We design and build specialized software solutions tailored to the unique workflows, data models, and regulatory compliance needs of specific sectors, with a particular focus on high-tech and adjacent regulated industries such as telecommunications, healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing, rather than relying on generic, one-size-fits-all solutions.

We are building the next generation of industry-specific enterprise applications, and increasingly these applications are AI-native: their core behavior is model-driven rather than explicitly authored. They interpret user intent, reason over context, invoke tools, and act on the user's behalf, all while respecting the complex business workflows, specialized data models, and evolving regulatory requirements of the industries we serve.

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will design, build, ship, and operate AI-native industry applications whose most important logic often lives in natural language (instructions, prompts, tool descriptions, and guardrails) as much as in code. You will work across the full software development lifecycle, and often embedded directly with customers as a forward deployed engineer, building against their data, integrations, and channels. Alongside hands-on delivery, you will drive engineering excellence, mentor other engineers, and influence architecture and long-term platform direction across multiple teams.

What you get to do in this role:

Design, build, and deliver scalable, AI-native enterprise applications for industry-specific workflows, data models, and compliance requirements, along with the integrations and channels that make them usable in production.
Build agentic behavior into those applications: intent interpretation, multi-step reasoning, tool and function invocation, and action on the user's behalf, delivered through conversational experiences across chat (and voice where the use case calls for it) that hold context and hand off cleanly between automated and human agents.
Design AI-driven autonomous workflows: decompose business processes into the steps and decision points an agent can execute, decide where autonomy is appropriate and where a human checkpoint is required, and define how exceptions, retries, and hand-back to a person are handled.
Author and maintain agentic instructions (system instructions, role definitions, tool descriptions, guardrails, and escalation rules) as versioned engineering artifacts under review and regression coverage, not configuration text.
Engineer prompts for reliability rather than demo quality, iterating against measured outcomes: task decomposition, golden examples, structured output schemas, grounding and citation, graceful failure, and token and latency cost.
Build automated evaluation and test non-deterministic behavior: golden datasets, multi-turn conversation suites, model-as-judge scoring calibrated to human review, CI gates, drift detection, and adversarial, jailbreak, grounding, and tool-selection testing.
Design software that lets customers configure and extend platform capabilities without sacrificing performance, reliability, or maintainability, and write clean, reusable, well-tested code following engineering best practices, including code reviews, unit testing, and test automation.
Specify precisely and direct AI coding agents: convert requirements into testable specifications with explicit scope, constraints, and acceptance criteria, decompose work into agent-sized tasks, and review agent output for correctness and maintainability. You own the result regardless of what produced it.
Deliver as a forward deployed engineer, embedded with customers when the work calls for it: building against their data, integrations, and channels, tuning instructions and evaluation sets in their environment, and returning with evidence that improves the product.
Own quality, safety, and reliability in production: monitor conversation quality, containment, hallucination, and unsafe actions, defend against prompt injection and data leakage, and feed production failures back into specifications and evaluation sets. Troubleshoot and optimize performance, scalability, and reliability across distributed systems.
Serve as a technical leader: mentor engineers, promote knowledge sharing, drive engineering best practices, and lead complex technical initiatives spanning multiple teams while influencing architecture and long-term platform direction.
Partner with product managers, designers, and stakeholders to translate complex business and regulatory requirements into scalable technical solutions, align on tradeoffs, and communicate capability, limitation, and risk clearly to non-engineers

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.
10+ years of professional software engineering experience in the SaaS industry, building and operating products at production scale.
A demonstrated track record of building, shipping, and operating production software, including hands-on delivery of AI-native application features that real users depend on rather than demos.
Direct, hands-on experience authoring agentic instructions and prompts, designing AI-driven autonomous workflows, and building the evaluation and testing that verifies non-deterministic behavior.
Advanced command of data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, design patterns, system design, APIs, and performance optimization.
Strong grounding in modern application architecture across cloud, distributed systems, and service-oriented or platform technologies, with solid data modeling and storage fundamentals. Depth matters more than any specific language or framework.
AI-native application development: agent orchestration at the application layer, tool and function calling, context assembly, grounding against enterprise data, and handling latency, cost, and failure.
Prompt engineering and evaluation of non-deterministic systems: intent-driven prompt design plus measurable frameworks for response quality, agent behavior, tool-selection accuracy, and regression risk, iterating against evaluation results rather than impressions.
Specification precision and architectural judgment: the ability to define problems rigorously enough that another engineer or an AI agent implements them correctly, and to decide soundly when to solve a problem in code, in instructions, or by delegating to an agent.
Working knowledge of safety, security, and data handling for AI-integrated applications: prompt injection, sensitive-data and secret leakage, over-broad tool access, and unsafe autonomous action, translated into concrete guardrails, least-privilege controls, and monitoring.
Willingness to work directly with customers in a forward deployed capacity, with the judgment to know when a fast local solution is right and when to hold out for the durable one, and the credibility to communicate capability, limitation, and risk to non-engineers.
Demonstrated ability to lead technically complex projects across multiple teams as a technical owner or engineering leader, with strong communication, collaboration, and mentoring skills.
Experience integrating AI into engineering workflows, decision-making, automation, or the software development process itself.
Preferred qualifications:
ServiceNow platform experience is recommended, including building configurable, extensible applications on the platform.
Deep domain experience in high-tech, and familiarity with adjacent regulated industries such as telecommunications, healthcare, financial services, or manufacturing, at a depth sufficient to challenge a requirement rather than only implement it.
Experience delivering conversational experiences in chat, voice, or both, including turn and context management, disambiguation and confirmation patterns, and automated-to-human handoff.
Prior forward deployed, solution engineering, or professional services experience delivering software inside a customer's environment.
Familiarity with modern UI frameworks (for example React, Angular, or Vue) and with evaluation, tracing, and prompt or instruction management tooling for LLM applications.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
10+ years of experience with Java or a similar OO language
Passion for JavaScript and the Web as a platform, reusability, and componentization
Advanced knowledge with data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, design patterns, and performance/scale considerations
Experience with any of the modern UI frameworks like Angular, React or Vue
Advanced knowledge experience working with relational databases including development, troubleshooting and performance optimization.
Experience with multiple technology stacks: Cloud Dev, Platforms, Web Dev, Frameworks or service–oriented architecture
Capability to manage multiple projects with material technical risk across teams and processes; may serve as a functional lead or technical owner

FD21 For positions in this location, we offer a base pay of $190,900 - $334,100, 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 office using a third-party service.

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. In addition, all qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with legal requirements.

Accommodations

We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are unable to use this online application and need an alternative method to apply, please 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.