Principal Software Engineer

• Design and develop scalable maintainable and reusable software components with a strong emphasis on performance and reliability.
• Collaborate with product managers to translate requirements into well-architected solutions owning features from design through delivery
• Build intuitive and extensible user experiences using modern UI frameworks ensuring flexibility for customer-specific needs.
• Contribute to the design and implementation of new products and features while enhancing existing product capabilities.
• Integrate automated testing into development workflows to ensure consistent quality across releases.
• Participate in design and code reviews ensuring best practices in performance maintainability and testability.
• Develop comprehensive test strategies covering functional regression integration and performance aspects
• Foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement by sharing best practices in engineering and quality
• Promote a culture of engineering craftsmanship knowledge-sharing and thoughtful quality practices across the team.

• 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.
• 15 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 12 years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with 8 years experience; or equivalent experience.
• 15 years of experience in software engineering with a track record of delivering high-quality products.
• Proficiency in Python Java or similar object-oriented languages.
• Experience with modern front-end frameworks such as Angular React or Vue.
• Strong knowledge of data structures algorithms object-oriented design design patterns and performance optimization
• Familiarity with automated testing frameworks (e.g. JUnit Selenium TestNG) and integrating tests into CI/CD pipelines
• Understanding software quality principles including reliability observability and production readiness.
• Ability to troubleshoot complex systems and optimize performance across the stack.
• Experience with AI-powered tools or workflows including validation of datasets model predictions and inference consistency.
• Comfort with development tools such as IDEs debuggers profilers source control and Unix-based systems
• 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 performance frameworks while continuously enhancing the scalability and reliability of the existing ecosystem.
• Plan lead and execute large-scale backend modernization and re-platforming efforts considering architectural trade-offs system risks and long-term maintainability.
• You will architect and build core services orchestration engines and asynchronous processing frameworks that power the automation and AI fabric of the platform - running both on our infrastructure and across public clouds.
• Develop robust backend integrations with other systems and services using REST gRPC and event-driven paradigms ensuring secure performant and maintainable interfaces.
• Collaborate closely with infrastructure and platform engineering teams to optimize deployment pipelines runtime performance and scalability across multi-tenant environments.
• Proven experience in building workflow engines orchestration frameworks message queues or event-driven architectures.
• Strong background in distributed systems microservices architecture and data consistency patterns (CQRS Saga eventual consistency etc.).
• Exposure to or collaborating with AI research teams applied ML systems or large-scale data platforms is highly desirable.
• Deep understanding of scale performance and reliability engineering - including load testing capacity planning and latency analysis.
• Demonstrated track record of innovation - conceptualizing prototyping and implementing new ideas that improve platform capabilities or developer productivity.
• 15 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 12 years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with 8 years experience; or equivalent experience.
• Exposure to or collaborating with AI research teams applied ML systems or large-scale data platforms is highly desirable. Ability to bridge engineering and research - translating conceptual AI or automation advances into production-grade scalable backend systems.
• Proficiency in API design (REST GraphQL gRPC) and secure service communication patterns.
• Strong foundation in asynchronous programming multi-threading and non-blocking I/O.
• Experience with observability tooling (Grafana Prometheus OpenTelemetry ELK) and distributed tracing.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD automated testing and blue-green or canary deployment models.
• Proven ability to lead architectural discussions drive complex technical decisions and mentor senior engineers.
• Experience with AI-native or automation platforms is a strong plus (e.g. ServiceNow Flow Designer RPA Task Mining Process Mining).
• Excellent communication skills with a collaborative mindset across cross-functional teams.
• Why join us:
• Build and deliver high-impact software that powers digital experiences for millions of users.
• Collaborate in a culture that values craftsmanship quality and innovation.
• Work symbiotically with AI and automation tools that enhance engineering excellence and drive product reliability.
• Be part of a culture that encourages innovation continuous learning and shared success.

What We Do

As the AI platform for business transformation we're putting AI to work across organizations — freeing people for work that matters. Making old tech work with new tech. Reaching across departments from the front office to the back office and every office in between. Our ambition? To become the AI defining enterprise software company of the 21st century (or "AI DESCO21C" as we like to call it). With more than 8400+ customers we serve approximately 90% of the Fortune 500® and we're proud to be a Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® and World's Most Admired Companies™.Explore your future career with us visit www.careers.servicenow.comFrom Fortune. ©2026 Fortune Media IP Limited. All rights reserved. Used under license.

Why Work With Us

By joining ServiceNow you are part of an ambitious team of change-makers who have a restless curiosity and a drive for ingenuity. We're committed to helping our people do their best work and live their best lives so we can fulfill our purpose together. At the fastest-growing enterprise software company you can grow your career faster.

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